Arbus is best known as a portraitist, but here she creates a portrait of a family by photographing an empty room, rather than the family itself. The room is decorated with all the furnishings of a middle-class, house-proud family: a plush carpet, a television in pride of place, a lamp covered with a plastic sheet (to protect it for visitors). The room is decorated for Christmas with an impressive tree that butts the ceiling and a large pile of extravagantly wrapped presents. Here, Arbus is focusing our attention on the ways in which people use their surroundings either to reveal, or in an attempt to improve their social standing, which links her work with that of contemporary social documentary photographers such as Martin Parr.