Bangladesh, Dec. 24 -- Every December we are invited—ritually, insistently—to feel better. Christmas culture promises reconciliation: with our families, our failures, our exhausted moral lives. Its dominant genre is consolation. We are told that if we endure quietly, sacrifice willingly, and remain kind within an unjust world, meaning will be restored. Nothing fundamental must change. What is required is gratitude.

This demand is not benign. Consolation is not simply an emotional offering; it is an ethical instruction. It teaches us how to live with injustice without contesting it. It trains us to convert endurance into virtue and survival into moral adequacy. Christmas culture does not deny suffering—it organizes it, a...