The decorations showed up overnight, like a reverse heist carried out by elves who accidentally lifted the wrong stuff and had to find a place to dump the evidence quickly. One night, the breakroom was its usual boring self, but by morning, it had transformed into a scene that looked like someone was trying to ransom the concept of “morale” with a handful of tinsel and a blinking, battery-operated reindeer. A string of garland sagged over the safety board, barely clinging to a pushpin as if it, too, was reconsidering its life choices. Plastic snowflakes dangled from the ceiling in defiance of the heating vents, swirling in slow, confused circles every time someone walked past. A giant inflatable Santa popped up near the repack station—cheerful in that way where you can’t tell if he’s welcoming you or desperate for you to unplug him.
In an environment that runs on fatigue and caffeine and is filled with people trying to keep up with goals that seem to be doing a slow, passive-aggressive moonwalk away from you, this display just seemed loud. The decorations felt like they were straining to pump joy into the atmosphere, but the air inside the place was too thick to penetrate. So instead of lifting the mood, all that cheer just pooled weirdly in the corners, like the holiday spirit had been poured into a room with a slanting floor.
I watched a blinking wreath slowly spin on its zip-tie and wasn’t sure if I should feel festive, grateful, or a little uneasy. Maybe all three. Holidays have always made me feel weird, like I’m expected to play a part without knowing my lines. Standing in that overdecorated breakroom, I realized many workplaces do the same thing: they announce a season of cheer and expect everyone to feel it, even though it’s often the tree in the corner doing most of the heavy lifting for morale instead of leadership.
Holiday decorations are supposed to be harmless, even charming—a cup-of-cocoa reminder that the world isn’t always about grinding people into fine, dustlike KPI sediment. At least in theory, they’re meant to reflect the company’s values. But decorations don’t explain themselves. A wreath might mean “we care,” or it might mean “we’re trying to distract you from not having a real break since October.” Without clear meaning, employees use their own feelings about the place to interpret the gesture.If the usual mood is tired and uncertain, the holiday cheer feels out of place, like someone dumped frosting on a pallet and called it a Christmas cookie.
That’s why some people find workplace decorations charming, while others feel dread. It’s not really about the lights. It’s the gap between what the decorations represent and what people actually experience. In a place driven by pressure and constant targets, sudden festivity can feel like being asked to pretend. Pretend we’re happy. Pretend the pace isn’t exhausting. Pretend this tinsel means appreciation, even if that appreciation never shows up any other way.
The trap is subtle: if you don’t feel uplifted by the decorations, you start to wonder if something’s wrong with you. But more often than not, it’s your instincts doing their job. Psychological signals don’t lie. If the cheer feels off, it’s because the culture hasn’t made the place feel safe, supportive, or truly connected. You can hang ornaments on anything—a tree, a forklift, or even that odd dock plate no one uses—but that doesn’t make it meaningful. Meaning comes from people, not objects.
The biggest mistake leaders make during the holidays is thinking that cheer and morale are the same. They aren’t. Cheer is temporary; morale is built into the structure. Cheer comes from lights, cookies, music, and maybe wearing a festive hat if that’s your thing. Morale comes from feeling respected, valued, supported, and not treated like an endless resource. You can buy one at the Dollar Tree. The other requires year-round effort.
This is where leadership theory starts poking holes in the inflatable Santa. Authentic Leadership, for example, isn’t about showing an emotion and expecting everyone to copy it. It’s about leaders being real, grounded in their values, and building trust through consistency (George, 2003). You can’t hand that job to a plastic wreath. If a workplace has spent months ignoring feedback, dismissing concerns, or overworking people, a burst of holiday décor doesn’t feel warm—it feels like emotional cover.
Transformational Leadership (Bass, Primer) runs into the same wall. Transformational leaders inspire meaning. They build connection. They offer a vision that makes hard work feel worthwhile. But if an organization tries to shortcut that process by decorating its way into inspiration, employees instantly feel the mismatch. You can’t spray-paint purpose to a snowflake and expect it to work.Meaning only matters when daily experiences support it.
This is also where Psychological Safety (Edmondson) sneaks in, wearing an ugly Christmas sweater. When safety is low—when people hesitate to speak up or when asking a question feels risky—holiday cheer starts to feel like an emotional demand: be happy, grateful, and festive. People often go along with it on the outside, but feel the opposite inside. The lights go up, but the culture doesn’t change.
And then there’s burnout. Maslach and Leiter say burnout happens when there’s a gap between what people need and what their workplace gives them—like fairness, community, and reasonable workloads. During the holidays, these gaps become more obvious. If the workplace feels understaffed, undervalued, or overwhelmed, decorations can make the difference between appearance and reality stand out even more. No amount of tinsel makes up for a year of feeling ignored. If anything, it makes the contrast sharper.
The truth is, morale doesn’t come from changing the scenery. It comes from changing the experience. Decorations can help, but they can’t take the place of real effort.
If decorations were enough to create culture, every home improvement store would become a utopia every December. You’d walk in, see a twelve-foot artificial tree leaning gently against a stack of salt bags, and immediately feel your soul knit itself back together. That’s not how it works anywhere, and certainly not in places where people spend forty hours a week pouring themselves into a place they don’t love, just trying to keep things from falling apart.
Real culture comes from countless small interactions that happen when nobody is watching. It’s the supervisor who actually listens when someone raises a concern. It’s the manager who says “go home” instead of “push through,” and the match between what leaders say and what they actually do. Culture is built in March, when the weather is bleak, and nobody has the energy for pageantry. It’s built in July when the building feels like the inside of a toaster. It’s built through fairness, communication, and steady support of shared values—not through decorations that get packed back into a box once the season ends.
This doesn’t mean decorations are bad. They can be fun. They can spark moments of levity. They can remind people that there’s more to life than work and productivity. But they’re not the glue holding everything together. They can highlight a healthy culture, or they can expose the cracks in an unhealthy one. They just can’t create the thing they’re trying to symbolize.
The irony of holiday cheer is that it works best in places that don’t need it to fix anything. If your team already feels seen, valued, and supported, a few lights will feel warm instead of forced. If your team is struggling, decorations won’t help—they’ll just make the gap between intention and reality impossible to ignore.
Leaders in places with bad culture don’t need to ban plastic snowflakes or toss the office tree in the trash. They just need to recognize that culture isn’t seasonal, and it isn’t decorative. It’s the lived experience of the people doing the work. And that experience—messy, human, and year-round—is what deserves the attention. The lights are optional. The leadership isn’t.