Christmas

In Andy Warhol’s diary, Christmas is not a single celebration but a recurring season in which gifts, parties, office work, and family memories come into view together. Entries from 1980, 1982, 1984, and 1985 record conspicuous presents and carefully staged social occasions, but also awkward encounters, money worries, and a persistent guilt about his mother. The holiday’s significance lies in that mixture: its rituals brought people together, while the diary notices the obligations and unease that accompanied the festivities.

The Holiday in the Diary

The Christmas entries were produced within a weekday routine that turned daily life into a sustained record. Before 1976, Pat Hackett had kept a sketchy Factory log focused on visitors, the previous night’s events, and Andy’s cash expenses. In fall 1976, the two began speaking by phone on weekday mornings. What began as a way to document activities and business spending for tax purposes grew into a diary that also let Warhol examine his life. The accounting motive remained present: the IRS had begun a major audit of his business in 1972 and continued scrutinizing it every year.

Hackett called around nine, or no later than 9:30 in the morning. Their conversations could last one or two hours, though Warhol referred to the work as a five-minute-a-day job. He described the previous day and night and gave her his expenses; Hackett took notes and typed the entry while his intonations were fresh. Every other week or so, she brought the typed pages to the office and attached the cab and restaurant receipts Warhol had left for her. The pages went into stationery-store letter boxes. The Diary was not recorded on weekends: on Monday, the pair held a triple session covering Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Christmas thus appears within a system that made even celebrations legible as dates, movements, purchases, and costs, while preserving the personal details that an expense log alone would not contain.

Gifts, Parties, and Social Obligations

In December 1980, the office Christmas party gathered John F. Kennedy Jr., Cornelia Guest, John Samuels IV, and Jimmy Burden—people Warhol remembered knowing when they were babies. He gave out copies of Popism, received a spear artwork from Ronnie, and noted that Jackie O had not invited him to her own Christmas party that year. The entry places a sense of time passing and a small social exclusion beside the exchange of presents. The next day, December 24, Warhol returned to Halston’s home in a sudden plunge in temperature, from forty degrees to minus fifteen. Halston gave him a green beaded dress that Warhol valued at about $5,000 and regarded as art, even while admitting that he would have preferred it in red.

The following day after Christmas, Warhol was already doing work for the next holiday season. For John Loring at Tiffany’s, whose company placed advertisements in Interview, he designed a set of nine Christmas cards incorporating real diamond dust. Each card showed part of a diamond; arranged together, the nine formed a complete one. The design made a gift commission double as an artistic object and a commercial obligation. It also prompted an older memory: Warhol recalled leaving drawings at Tiffany’s in the 1950s and having someone steal them. The festive assignment therefore carried a history of professional entanglement and loss, rather than standing apart from work.

In 1982, the season brought several different kinds of office and social strain. Warhol went to a party hosted by Vincent Fremont and Shelly, where there were about eight babies and people from the office; he asked Jay Shriver to get him a cab as a Christmas present. At the office, Brigid Berlin said that the present everyone would really want was for Christopher Makos never to come up again. Makos later suggested that he might pay Berlin the $20 he owed her for work on a project for which he had not been paid. Warhol characterized him as cheap, while noting that Jay had gone home to Milwaukee and seemed the only person who might have worked. The episode makes the office gathering’s festive frame a setting for unresolved debts, irritation, and disagreements about labor. Warhol also noted that Jon Gould had left for New Hampshire, adding separation to a season he described as confusing.

At Halston’s gathering on December 24, Warhol and his party arrived four hours late and eventually found Halston upstairs beside the Christmas tree with Steve Rubell. Halston gave him what might have been two Elsa Peretti candlesticks from Tiffany’s, but Warhol had to sign a note promising to return them if Halston could not obtain another pair for himself. At the same time, Warhol was anxious about choosing the right sizes for the paintings he planned to give people. The scene turns gift-giving into a calculation of taste, reciprocity, and obligation. On Christmas Day he went to church, called the day miserable, and brought Benjamin Liu to the office to help pay bills before Liu left for San Francisco. Warhol worked with him all afternoon and paid him $100 for the day, while hearing about heavy snow in Denver. The practical business of settling bills and paying for help displaced any simple picture of a holiday at rest.

Awkward Encounters and Carefully Chosen Presents

Warhol’s December 1984 entries distinguish sharply between kinds of Christmas parties. He expected to give scarves at Interview’s party. Stephen Sprouse brought him two wigs, but they were gray and stretch rather than the unusual style or color Warhol had hoped for; he added that he and Sprouse never knew what to say to each other. He anticipated that a party at Christopher Makos’s neighbors’ home would be disappointing, while remembering Halston’s parties as comparatively pleasant. The contrast makes the holiday less a uniform atmosphere than a set of social experiences Warhol evaluated person by person.

That evening, Warhol tried to secure an invitation to Claudia Cohen’s wedding to Ron Perelman. He was interested in the planned celebrity roles: Liz Smith was to be matron of honor, and Cohen’s fiancé, Dennis Stein, was, Warhol thought, to be best man. Finding the house lit but its occupants absent, he left their scarves at the door. His attention to the wedding and its guests shows how Christmas giving could also serve as a way of maintaining social ties and approaching events he wanted to attend.

Warhol then went with Benjamin Liu to Morgan’s, Steve Rubell’s new hotel, where Rubell was letting Bianca Jagger live in the penthouse. Jagger’s personal belongings were scattered through the party room, exposed to the possibility that anyone could take them. Warhol gave her and Jade scarves; Jagger’s was framed, but later he saw it out of its frame on the bed. He did not know why she had removed it, and his insistence that even an unliked gift was art registers the gap between his intention and the recipient’s response. The incident turns a present into a fragile bid for recognition, placed amid the careless visibility of private possessions at a party.

Christmas Eve, Family Memory, and Uneasy Afterthoughts

In December 1985, the entries again move between private gestures and shared festivities. At a small dinner for Jean-Michel Basquiat, arranged after Tina Chow called, Warhol brought an old hairpiece of his own. He had it framed and marked it with the year 1983, though he did not know exactly when the wig had been made. It was a Paul Bochicchio piece, a Paul Original, and Basquiat was shocked by the present. The gift was unusually personal: Warhol gave away an object from his own collection, while the uncertain date attached to it revealed how even a carefully framed keepsake could carry incomplete provenance.

Before another Christmas gathering, Warhol arranged to pick up Jean and give her earrings she had admired. He initially doubted the earrings, then came to think they might be Schiaparelli. Their gold strands moved around rubies at the center, and Jean was thrilled; she had not expected the pin as well. The detail records a gift not merely as an object but as a remembered preference, a change in Warhol’s own judgment, and a visible response from its recipient.

On December 24, the weather was unusually mild, fifty-five degrees but feeling closer to sixty. The Interview party was already in full swing when Warhol reached the office, although he did not go over to it; people drifted to his side of the building, and the party ended around four. Later, he took a group to Nippon for Christmas Eve dinner, spending $280, and gave out small Be Somebody with a Body paintings. Here the season’s giving took a distinctly artistic form, even as the expense remained part of the diaristic record.

The holiday’s most private recurrence arrives in Warhol’s reflection on his mother. At Christmas, he thought about whether he had done the right thing by sending her back to Pittsburgh and said he still felt guilty. That admission changes the force of the surrounding scenes: the gifts, parties, and office routines do not erase the family separation that the season brings back to mind. Across the entries, Christmas is at once a calendar of public obligations and a prompt for solitary reassessment—a time when social connection is actively arranged, and when unresolved absence remains present.