"Christmas in Connecticut" at 80: against the tradwife scam and heartless modernity

...and a testament to the power of good Hungarian cooking

Christmas in Connecticut (1945) stars the greatest actress of all time, Barbara Stanwyck, as Elizabeth Lane, a tradwife influencer who’s faked the whole trad thing — and the wife thing, too. It’s the best movie about 2025.

Lane is a feature writer for the magazine Smart Housekeeping, and although she lives in a cramped apartment, unmarried and childless, her writerly persona for the magazine is a homemaker who lives on a farm with a baby, a spinning wheel, and a husband. (She doesn’t have a baby, a husband, or a spinning wheel, either. Or a cow, etc.) Suddenly, she’s forced to fake being her features’ persona in real life. Her publisher, Alexander Yardley, has gotten a request on behalf of Jefferson Jones, a heroic sailor, who’d spent 18 days at sea after his ship was sunk by a German U-boat. Yardley wants Jones to get a few days of fine home-living at the Lane residence, which does not exist. Hijinks ensue.

It’s worth beginning at the beginning.

The movie, oddly, opens with the U-boat. We see the men inside it, and hear orders barked in German as the Nazis torpedo Jones’s ship. Jones doesn’t heroically defeat them; it’s not an action movie. Next thing we see, he’s on the raft with one shipmate. Then, cut! to him in the hospital with his shipmate/raftmate. Jones gets engaged to a nurse he doesn’t love, to secure better grub from the hospital’s kitchen, all while pining after the meals he reads about in Lane’s Smart Housekeeping articles. Hence his eventual trip out to visit “her” “home,” courtesy of Yardley.

Why open with the U-boat? It’s a Christmas movie, after all. Starting with Germans launching torpedos and sinking a US navy ship is strange. But it sets up the ultimate contrast: the cold, mechanistic threat of modernity versus the warmth of the American home, as fabricated—and eventually found—by Lane.

The fictionalised Elizabeth Lane, found only in the pages of Smart Housekeeping, has the trad life of every aspiring tradwife’s dreams: a big country house, a farm, and a husband who can work while she stays home.

Early in the film, the nurse who Jones pretends to love worries that he’ll leave her. The solution? Jones has never known home life, and his fiancee thinks he’ll be less likely to ditch her if he experiences the comforts of a home. Jones hasn’t had a home; everyone the nurse knows lives in temporary or isolated housing. Relative to the housing and homemaking plights of 2025- I mean, of these characters in 1945, what a marvel is Lane’s home!

Of course, just as she has no country home, Elizabeth Lane is not really married. The “husband” in her charade for Yardley and Jones is Lane’s longtime suitor, the wealthy bachelor John Sloan, who agrees to the hoax with the expectation of marrying Lane, for realsies, almost as soon as they arrive. To those she’s duping, therefore, Elizabeth Lane is Mrs. Sloan, even if she keeps narrowly escaping becoming Mrs. Sloan in sooth.

Lane’s articles at Smart Housekeeping manufacture a promise for war-wearied women’s yearning. When it becomes clear to Yardley that the Elizabeth Lane he knew is a lie, he rants:

My public believe in you, Mrs. Sloan. Millions of women in these United States pattern their daily lives after that feature. And you're gonna live up to their ideals, or my name is not Alexander Yardley!

Their model is a fake; their ideal life is a hollow sham; they unwittingly emulate a fiction. Lane’s a Thomas Kinkade-esque, saccharine vision of wholesome, rural domesticity. She’s a plastic Hestia guarding America’s hearth against the bleak threat of modernity, whether that modernity takes the shape of a U-boat, or builds itself according to the blueprints of her fake husband, the architect John Sloan.

Mr. Sloan, aside from being an insufferable dweeb, is a self-described “progressive architect,” professionally interested in planning cities and homes. I’d never thought much about Sloan until I rewatched the movie today. At a fundraising dance, Sloan has corned Yardley, who’s offered him a column on architecture at Smart Housekeeping. At one point, Sloan says:

And with the new prefabricated methods and post-war plastics, we shall positively revolutionise home building!

Home building — prefabrication — plastic. He’s hardly the rustic farmer-gentleman. He’s a “progressive,” after all, in the sense of that time. Sloan’s not interested in homemaking. He won’t stop prattling on about home building, but his goal is “revolution,” which would seem to militate against the idealised stasis of Lane’s articles. The cunning of modernity as seen in the U-boat’s efficient interior must seem pretty nifty to a man like Sloan.

In the end, Sloan loses. He’s a bore, we all know Elizabeth Lane and Jefferson Jones will be together. But they’ve both played dirty tricks — yes, even if he’s annoying, it was bad of Lane to fake out Sloan with the promise of marriage to save her career by using his farmhouse. And Jones lied to his nurse fiancee too… but in the end we learn she’s eloped with his raft-mate, in the meantime, without telling him. Not that Jones knew that when he chose not to reveal his engagement to Lane — still, it makes it hard to sympathise with the nurse, just as it’s hard to sympathise with Sloan. But all the lies and the backgrounded brutality of war melt in the warmth of truth.

About as confusingly as the U-boat, Christmas itself doesn’t feature prominently in Christmas in Connecticut. But the halls are decked and the winter is white, and thematically, the bells ring true: it’s a Christmas movie.

All the central characters in the movie are alone in their own ways. Lane writes ChatGPT-coded fantasies of domesticity to warm the war-chilled hearts of the nation, while living merely to buy herself pricy clothes, like a mink coat. Jones stares down the desolation of cold saltwater from horizon to horizon, for two and a half weeks, after the deaths of all his shipmates but one. And Sloan is an incel.

Early in the film, we learn that Yardley’s family won’t be having a Christmas worth the name. He learns that his doctor has advised him to adopt an ascetic, flavourless diet. So, he invites himself to join Jones at Lane’s cooked-up Connecticut idyll. He’s lonely and hungry.

Jones, too, is hungry. After all, he faked his way into betrothal to get food. He doesn’t want the weird milk soup that the doctors want him to eat as he recovers from starvation! He wants steak. One of the first scenes in the movie is Jones’s dream about eating fine cuisine while, in the waking world, he’s starving on a raft. The thought of Lane’s delicious cooking animates him like nothing else when he’s reached the hospital.

But Lane can’t cook. She has her Hungarian chef friend, Felix, give her recipes to use in the magazine (again: very ChatGPT-coded of her). She brings Felix along to the Connecticut farmhouse to do the cooking for her, so she can hide the fact that she can’t make a single dish from her articles. In the end, Felix orchestrates Lane’s success: he delays her formal marriage to Sloan through sleight of hand until she can finally get with Jones; he learns and disseminates the truth about who’s actually engaged or married at the precisely correct moments; and he uses Yardley’s craving for kidneys to his advantage while convincing him not to fire Lane, once the publisher has realised his star writer is a fraud.

So, no, Christmas day doesn’t feature centrally in Christmas in Connecticut. But — what could be more Christmasful than a movie where lonely, cold, hungry people, dropped staccato-like against the background of global strife, end up united by a jolly old chef who cooks hearty Hungarian food? — and where the coldhearted illusions of false traditionalism and inhuman modernity are melted by truth, love, and community? These two false promises, the uncanny veneer of traditionalism and the cruelty of technological dehumanisation, are the same forces arrayed against the Christmas spirit this year. Christmas in Connecticut says to hell with them.

Merry Christmas!

…Writing about New England media makes me feel un-Southern.

Merry Christmas, y’all.