Home Alone, the 1990 John Hughes blockbuster, has become a perennial Christmas favorite. Other American “Christmas movies” of post-modern vintage, for example Die Hard (1988) and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989), apart from a surface-smattering of tinsel and eggnog, have little to do with Christmas itself. Home Alone, however, tells us a lot about what Christmas has come to mean in America, revealing (albeit through humor) how sad our post-Christian civilization has become.

The key line in Home Alone is uttered by the film’s protagonist, an 8-year-old boy named Kevin McCallister. Kevin lives with his parents and siblings in a suburban Chicago mansion filled with the trappings of material comfort. And yet, being sent to the attic after a silly argument with his oldest brother, Kevin wishes that his family would “disappear.” When he awakens the next morning to find that his family really has disappeared—they inadvertently left on a trip to Paris without him—he is overjoyed at his newfound freedom. “I made my family disappear!” he smirks, believing his curse has effected the miracle of their absence. He runs around the house, jumps on beds while eating snacks, and generally goes hog wild, reveling in having the huge place all to himself. He learns how to shop for food and to do the laundry—and other things one needs to do to maintain oneself in perfect solitude amid material plenty.

What we are shown here is precisely the opposite of the first Christmas. Mary and Joseph, Jesus’ earthly parents, were not home, and not alone. They were traveling together, a Holy Family with Christ in Mary’s womb, unable to find a place to stay for the night. Turned away from human habitations, they rested in a stable in Bethlehem. The Christ Child, born that night among lowing beasts, was laid first in a manger, a feed trough for cattle. No Christmas treats for Him except breastmilk. Nor did the baby Jesus wish that his family would disappear. Through Him, the Second Person of the Trinity, God adopted the human race into His own family. Jesus, the newborn, was not brought into the world to play in a luxurious house in the Chicago suburbs, but to die so that everyone might be welcomed into God’s mansion in Heaven.

Much of Home Alone, by contrast, is taken up with Kevin’s attempts to protect his suburban home from two bumbling thieves who are targeting the wealthy neighborhood while its residents are away on vacation. It’s not Kevin’s soul they are after, but his material possessions. Kevin saves his home in the end, but it remains empty until, at the last minute, his family reappears, having rushed back from France after they realized they had left their young son in Chicago.

The happy reunion that follows, as well as another family’s reconciliation as part of one of the film’s subplots, make for a predictably sweet Hollywood ending. But for millions of Americans today reality is harsh. Like Kevin, having wished away family, they end up home alone at Christmas—and on every other day of the year. Contraception, abortion, and the overall cultural turn away from sacrificing for others in favor of tending to the temple of the solitary self, have ensured that many of us will spend this Christmas home alone, watching Home Alone—a Christmas movie that’s not about Christmas at all.