For my birthday this year, I treated myself to something a little different: a matinee at the Stranger Things Broadway show.
If you’re a die-hard fan—or shopping for one—it actually makes for a great Christmas gift. I went on Nov. 1, and from the moment the curtain went up, it was clear this wasn’t some novelty cash-in. The special effects were unreal, the kind that make you forget you’re sitting in a theater and not staring at a screen. The show is a prequel centered on Henry Creel, the boy who ultimately becomes Vecna, tracing his story back through mid-20th-century Hawkins, Ind., in the decades leading up to the 1970s.
What struck me most wasn’t just how evil shows up, but how it’s formed. The story is less about monsters and more about origins—how isolation, fear and unresolved pain can slowly harden into something dark. You don’t see evil arrive fully formed. You watch it grow.
At the very end, after the final blackout, the house lights stayed low and a trailer for Stranger Things Season 5 rolled across the screen.
The crowd went wild.
Sitting there on my birthday, surrounded by a cheering audience, it felt like one of those rare pop-culture moments that sneaks up on you and quietly asks for a little reflection.
With Season 5, Part Two, scheduled to drop on Christmas Day, suddenly, it was hard not to notice how neatly this story lines up with the season we’re in.
Beneath the monsters, telekinesis and 1980s nostalgia, Stranger Things has been telling a very old story about light pushing back against darkness.
That theme became impossible to ignore when Part One ended with Will Byers discovering he possesses the same power as Eleven. Only his power feels different—less about force, more about devotion. Will’s strength comes from loyalty, empathy, and an unshakable love for the people who have stood beside him. If Eleven’s power is force, Will’s is faith.
To be fair, the show hasn’t told us exactly where Will’s power comes from. It may be born of love and connection. Or it may be something darker, a residue of Vecna himself, reclaimed rather than created. Will has been touched by the Upside Down longer than anyone. And if his strength was forged in darkness, that only sharpens the question the story seems to be asking: whether power is defined by its source, or by what we choose to do with it.
And that’s where the allegory beneath the neon-lit surface begins to glow.
Fans sometimes forget that Stranger Things hints at its thematic playbook in the second episode of the entire series, when the boys use "A Wrinkle in Time" to explain what’s happening to Will. Madeleine L’Engle’s book is another story of a child pulled into a realm of psychic darkness by a vast hive-mind evil, and in that world, force doesn’t win. Love does.
Meg Murry doesn’t defeat IT by fighting it. She defeats it by loving someone the darkness has taken. Evil isn’t overpowered; it’s out-loved.
That’s the direction Stranger Things seems to be steering Will. He isn’t a warrior. He isn’t a weapon. His gift is the same one L’Engle gave Meg—and the same one at the heart of the season we’re celebrating.
Before Jesus ever teaches or heals, he first goes alone into the wilderness for 40 days and confronts evil directly. Will’s journey follows a similar pattern. From the moment the demogorgon pulled him into the Upside Down, he hasn’t just witnessed darkness—darkness entered him. Claimed him. Tried to reshape him.
The show doesn’t shy away from presenting that darkness as a profound violation. It was an invasion of the self that echoes the language of assault, which only sharpens the contrast with the kind of power Will ultimately embodies.
Yet somehow, it didn’t break him.
Christian tradition describes Jesus descending into hell before rising again—not as a defeated figure, but as someone breaking the power of darkness from the inside. Will is the one character who has literally gone into the underworld and returned.
The show tips its hand more explicitly than people realize. Vecna’s desire to gather 12 followers isn’t random screenwriting; it’s religious architecture. Twelve apostles for a new world order, except this time the messiah is a creature of domination and despair.
If Vecna is the counterfeit savior, then Will, marked by darkness but never claimed by it, becomes the counterweight. One seeks power through control; the other through love. One builds a kingdom of fear; the other draws strength from connection.
That contrast isn’t unique to Christianity.
Hanukkah tells a parallel story: one rooted not in conquest, but in resistance. A small, outmatched group refuses to surrender its identity to a powerful empire. The underdogs hold the line. Good confronts evil not because victory is guaranteed, but because faith demands it.
The miracle of Hanukkah isn’t just that the oil lasted eight days. It’s that the fight was taken on at all.
Light is lit in defiance of darkness. Identity is preserved against assimilation. Faith becomes the quiet force that turns the tide.
That’s Will’s story, too. He isn’t the strongest. He isn’t the loudest. He isn’t the most feared.
He’s the one who keeps choosing love, who refuses to let darkness define him, even after living inside it. Whether you frame that story through Christmas or Hanukkah, the message is strikingly similar: light doesn’t need to dominate to win. It just needs to endure.
This time of year, whether you’re lighting candles or gathering around a tree, is about the same essential hope. That darkness is real, but not final. That faith matters. That love endures. That light, even when small, is worth defending.
So if you find yourself watching Stranger Things on Christmas Day, or talking about it during Hanukkah, and you notice that the character most touched by darkness is the one positioned to confront it, not with force but with love, you’re not imagining things.
That’s not a new story. It’s one of the oldest ones we have.
Merry Christmas. Happy Hanukkah. And may your season be filled with light, however, and whenever, you choose to kindle it.
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