Each week, the Sunday Post highlights just a few things we loved reading and want to share with you. Settle in with a cup of coffee, or tea, if that's your pleasure — we saved you a seat! Read an essay or an article online that you loved? Let us know at submissions@seattlereviewofbooks.com. Need more browse? You can also look through the archives.

The commercialization of the commercialization of Christmas

It’s the time of year again to listen to the same seven Christmas songs recorded in the 1950s, make the same cookie recipe, and rewatch A Christmas Story. Hallmark knows this and is on deck to provide what we’re jonesing for, churning out nostalgia-filled Christmas movies following time-worn formulas. Emily Todd VanDerWerff reports from the epicenter: ChristmasCon, a Hallmark-sponsored Christmas movie convention.

But we’ve recently entered a very unusual era for Christmas as a nostalgia-driven holiday, because the period so many adults, from baby boomers down to millennials, are nostalgic for was a period of overt, capitalist excess and mass-market Christmas entertainment. Christmas past is no longer a time before industrialism or a time before World War II.

It’s a time when everybody was watching the same thing on TV. So when Hallmark Christmas movies explicitly romanticize Christmas past, they’re romanticizing an era of popular entertainment that didn’t question for a second that the leads of a romantic comedy would be white, straight, and cis. They’re romanticizing an era when Charlie Brown was already complaining that Christmas had gotten too commercial.

What a bestseller really tells us about a book’s popularity

This is for those who’ve always wondered what it actually means for a book to be on the New York Times bestseller list. I was surprised to learn that not all purchases made in bookstores necessarily count toward inclusion in the list because not all bookstores report their sales to the newspaper. (Spoiler alert: the publishers NPR talked to for this piece said Donald Trump Jr.’s book still probably would have made it on the list without the Republican National Committee’s bulk order, though it certainly helped.)

Nobody quite knows what goes into making a New York Times bestseller. The paper doesn't reveal its methodology, other than to say in part that it's based on a "detailed analysis of book sales from a wide range of retailers." So I asked the people who are in the best position to make educated guesses about a book's sales, and who watch the lists closely: publishers.

How the internet killed feminism

Soraya Roberts examines the rise and fall of feminist blogs in this piece, from the birth of big ones like Feministe and Shakesville at the start of the millenium, to the decline of the category in the current decade. The main crux of this well-researched history of the feminist blogosphere is the division and tensions between white feminist blogs and intersectional blogs — the topics they chose to focus on, their monetization strategies, and the disproportionate media attention and credit white bloggers received.

While a group of mostly white, mostly New York-based feminist bloggers were making their names in the aughts, it was the radical selfless activists on the margins of the blogosphere who erected the scaffolding for the feminist internet as we now know it today. As Brittney Cooper, co-founder of the Crunk Feminist Collective, told me, “The wokeness that we see in this generation is indeed a direct result of all of this labor.”

Little Women was always big

We still have two weeks left to reread Little Women before Greta Gerwig’s version makes its way to theaters. Full disclosure: I can’t be sure if I read it as a child or if it was one of those works that reached me through cultural osmosis — characters in children’s books are constantly reading it, Bart and Lisa read it on The Simpsons, and Joey (of all people) reads it on Friends and has to put it in the freezer when it gets too scary. I remember the book being quite thin in my hands, which makes me think it was an abridged copy. This makes sense when you look at it as America’s first huge franchise for children and young adults, with sequels, spin-offs, and many movie versions. Hillary Kelly’s timeline in Vulture gives a primer on its history as a “super-franchise,” starting from the inception:

Louisa May Alcott, who grew up in Massachusetts in a family of abolitionists and was taught by Henry David Thoreau, had been writing saucy fiction under a pen name (stories like “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment”) when her publisher suggested she write a book about girls. Her first thought? “Never liked girls nor knew many, except my sisters.” So she based her book on them (she was Jo).