Why Skyrim is the ultimate Christmas game

Skyrim is all about comfort, celebration and cheer.

It’s not just the snow or spirited Nordic indulgence in hearty food and heartier drink. While Skyrim’s frigid winds breeze over all manner of wintery wonders, what makes this the quintessential game for the holidays is simple: Christmas, for a lot of people, is a time of comfort, celebration, and cheer. From the hustle and bustle of Whiterun to the solitary silence of Winterhold, it’s clear that Tamriel’s northernmost province has all three of these qualities in spades.

In a way, it feels strange to be writing this article in 2021, a decade and two whole console generations after Skyrim originally launched. That’s right, Skyrim came out for the PS3 – excuse me while I transform into a draugr. Still, all this does is testify to its staying power. Despite bigger, brighter, and braver games having come out over the last ten years, at least part of Skyrim’s enduring impact is attributable to other games ostensibly but not actually surpassing it.

That’s an important point. Games have progressed enormously in the years since our first adventures through Markarth and Mzinchaleft. Both Mass Effect 2 and The Witcher 3 outranked Skyrim on our list of the best Western RPGs, while titans from across the pond like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild have established themselves as the de facto open-world games of our time. Skyrim is deeply ingrained in our collective cultural memory as a phenomenal effort, but its time in the sun has been and gone. So it would seem.

In reality, this is Skyrim’s greatest, perhaps most unintentional strength. The whole reason this game is so comfortable, celebratory, and cheerful is because of how deeply, reliably familiar it is. If you’ve put any respectable number of hours into Skyrim – “respectable” being a very subjective term here – it’s likely that you don’t follow Ralof to Riverwood after escaping Helgen. 

Instead, you go east to Riften or west to Falkreath, or north to and through Riverwood without stopping to greet anyone. You could pick out the farmer’s field where the Companions first fell a giant from a mile away, and probably have a decent chance at deducing whether said giant came from Guldun Rock or Secunda’s Kiss. Even after ten years away from the land of the Nords, you’ll recognize the road to Bleak Falls Barrow. All of this boils down to Skyrim being one of the most easily learnable games of all time, not because it’s simplistic, but because it fools you into thinking you find its teachings fun.

And what is the purpose of those teachings? To instruct you what you’re supposed to do, obviously, but also to show you just how sprawling and filled with opportunity this world is. This, Skyrim’s true genius, is what makes it so infinitely replayable and enjoyable to return to during Christmas specifically. You know everything about this game and still can’t go more than ten minutes without it surprising you. The only thing Skyrim needs to shine is time, which, over the holidays, a lot of us have in abundance.

There’s a common joke among fans of The Elder Scrolls that loads of people reinstall Skyrim once a year and do the exact same things they’ve done 50 times before – common characters include battlemages, vampire lords called Alucard, and wood elf stealth archers named Legolas. While there’s some truth to this gag, the boring reality is that it’s impossible to play Skyrim the same way twice. It might walk like the same game and talk like the same game, but it’s a sensational shapeshifter capable of taking on a near-infinite amount of new forms. Imagined as a Christmas present, it’s like new shoes or good aftershave – something you might be gifted once a year, every year, that you’ll get some decent mileage out of. The thing about Skyrim is that it’s a gift you can give yourself, for free. Combined with a week or two off work, lazing around a house filled with 50 too many turkey sandwiches, it’s a perfect fit for the holidays, masterfully satisfying the notion of clumsily half-paying attention for two hours before exclaiming “No way!” once you realize you can rob people scot-free if you put a bucket over their head.

There are certainly other games out there that more explicitly qualify as ‘Christmas games’ – Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales and Batman: Arkham Origins are two obvious examples of that. These are just games that take place during Christmas, though, as opposed to ones that are particularly well-suited to the Christmas period itself. When you approach it from that perspective, Skyrim is the only clear winner. Its juxtaposition of familiarity and surprise allows it to be simultaneously comforting and constantly riveting. Half the time you’re slouched wearing a lazy smile, the other you’re sat 45 degrees forward, eyes wide open, staring in incredulity as the giant from earlier soars through the skies above on dragonback. As a whole, it’s a pretty accurate distillation of what makes the holiday season special in the first place: a few rare days of effortless contentment with the occasional outburst of sheer, almost stupid joy.

Plus the snow is nice. Obviously.

Written by Cian Maher on behalf of GLHF.