a theory: there are food holidays and sex holidays

food holidays are great, sex holidays are awful.

food holidays are about relaxation, loved ones, and gluttony. in a US context, it's Christmas, Thanksgiving (the ne plus ultra of food holidays) and the 4th of July; idk if other countries' national (independence) days qualify.

sex holidays are about the body, desire, booze, cranking the speed on the hedonic treadmill for the night, a pagan ritual of leisure capital etc etc etc. New Years is the model. Valentine's Day. there are more and more of them now: St. Patrick's, Cinco De Mayo. and Halloween, a nauseating combo of a sex holiday and a children's holiday.

original title of this thread was "fuck halloween"

Easter stolen from its sex-holiday originators and given to the foodies.

Oh, 4th of July is a food holiday for you?

i think both categories make me feel shitty during the lead-up but are usually okay once it's underway. but i am very down on halloween right this minute from not being able to think of a costume and consequently feeling like a real loser. i wonder if this is also a family vs. friends or intro vs extrovert distinction. i would consider 4th of july at the boundary zone between categories as it's also a night you're sort of expected to be doing something particularly cool/fun/social, being out with people and doing party drugs on a roof to see the fireworks etc.

the 4th is about hotdogs and burgers ime

read that as "hostages and burgers"

how would you factor something like this into your theory

http://www.cardoons.co.uk/acatalog/Sexy_Santa.html

nothing hedonistic about valentine's day

i just think of "family holidays" and "friend holidays". the former suck, the latter are great. it's sad that most food holidays fall into the former category but you can't really beat the hedonism of the latter

party drugs on a roof? idk man i grew up in a small town! sure the 4th is more social but it's kind of a "summer thanksgiving" if u will

xps

the key with party holidays is that you don't have to do the alienating conformist things you're "meant" to do. you don't have to go out to overpriced terrible clubs on NYE, you don't have to find a costume for halloween. just hang out with the friends you want to hang out with and get turnt up

Halloween is more of a food holiday for me inasmuch as I prefer to stay in and watch horror movies and eat a bunch of junk.

i think xmas has more of a drunk, hedonistic element in the uk. the idea of getting trashed and trying to get laid at your "office christmas do" is vaguely horrifying over here (well at least to me)

yeah i mean in general the 4th is supposed to be summer thanksgiving, extended family with hot dogs. i think my impression of it is distorted by recent years being young-ish in new york, so people are on the hunt for a cool extended-friend-gathering rather than settling comfortably into the certainty of doing something with their blood relations. lots of txts bouncing around, "oh sounds cool, we were thinking of stopping by there after this bar, maybe this other party though" etc.

i'm kinda with lex overall but i do think showing up to a halloween shindig without having made a costume feels kind of insultingly lazy. like you're actively subtracting from how fun it feels to be there seeing what everybody else created. there's some kind of minimum obligation IMHO. but this may be my own individual complex since i'm not very creative and always get myself into a hole struggling to make a great idea happen.

I'm going to a halloween party tonight and earlier this week I happened to tell my friend who's co-hosting it that I'm probably not going to bother with a costume because I haven't prepared anything (haven't had the time or money) and I'm going straight from work to a concert to the party so won't have time to change (although it might have been fun to show up at a stockhausen performance at st Catherine's college made up as a goblin or whatever people do). Anyway he started giving me shit about how I can't not come in costume & should "at least get a sheet and cut a hole in!" I guess I just feel like any party worth attending is not going to be made less fun by one person turning up in clothes instead of a ruined sheet.

I did go into a "party shop" the other day just to see if they had anything relatively effortless but I had to leave because it was horrible. Not paying exorbitant amounts of cash to dress up as a "red Indian" or "Zulu warrior" thx anyway

I did the sheet ghost thing a couple of years ago. Wore a toqueover it to make it "Canadian ghost". Still didn't make it any less terrible a costume and a waste of, an admittedly old and crummy, sheet.

one person in street clothes is not ruinous, but if everybody did that it'd be a really dull halloween.

this party is guaranteed not to be dull, that's not really a concern. Also we are mostly British adults so I'm pretty sure everyone's just barely pretending to give a shit about halloween to begin with

If I'd had the time and inclination I might have done a día de los muertos thing. In the spirit of the season I've popped into the £1 shop to get a shit plastic mask tho, so nobody can accuse me of not playing along

4th of july is about drinking a cooler of beer and trying to not singe your eyebrows off with illicit fireworks while dodging errant bottle rockets

because america

xpost things are prob different in the UK yeah. im at the point of deciding to stay home tonight and tomorrw cuz i really can't think of a damn thing.

i think a lot of this depends on a few things

1) how you feel about your family
2) how you feel about going out and partying
3) whether you are partnered or not
4) whether you have kids or not

my family is pretty great so i dig food holidays a lot. my in-laws are ehhhhh so christmas sometimes grates.

halloween always kind of sucked except in college when i actually felt okay about wearing a costume and it was a major party holiday. after that it is just like idk, not for me. i live in a major college city (boston) and i went downtown one time on halloween and i will never do that again. now i have kids so it is pretty fun. i am okay with never wearing a costume again though. costumes are for my kids.

the "sex holidays" can bring a lot of anxiety and FOMO if you can't work out plans. i've been partnered for 12 years so valentine's day has always been like sure whatever we can go out for a nice date. NYE though, my wife is super introverted and has never really felt much of a desire to go out on NYE so i spent a lot of disappointed low-key "movie" nights at home, fine in general but i do like being w/ friends on NYE. now we have a NYE party at our house and that is really great, it was a good compromise.

I really love Halloween/Dia De Los Muertos and am all into decorating the house, making jack-o-lanterns, altars for dead relatives, watching horror movies, listening to my Disney "Haunted House" 45, taking the kids trick-or-treating, etc. But fuck getting a costume together, it's such a hassle and waste of $$$ as an adult. I will put on black + facepaint for the Dia De Los Muertos parade cuz it's easy and basic and effective but beyond that yeah costumes are for the kids.

thread title makes me think of Dionysian holidays and Apollonian holidays...

two best holidays in any culture are 4th of July and Thanksgiving.

Halloween and new years are my least favorite holidays, this is pretty much why. Thanksgiving is the best, the pure essence of a food holiday

fuck all the holidays

^^^ sees all holidays as sex holidays

thread title makes me think of Dionysian holidays and Apollonian holidays...

two best holidays in any culture are 4th of July and Thanksgiving.

― ryan, Friday, October 30, 2015 12:26 PM (33 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

my dude

i could have reversed the descriptors and called them "family holidays" and "booze holidays;" do to so i think misses something, idk what. the idea is that food holidays don't ask much of you, but sex holidays are about satisfying a demand. though all the holiday stress people have about family, travel and consumption kind of throws that idea off

i don't think of the food holidays as "apollonian" though, more like the household gods?

The former is all about food porn and the latter is all about the recipe for sex.

Well there are also fast holidays that are neither

Have you had your Christmas fuck yet?

Halloween is not good

dammit i even have some okay costumes in my longstanding idea file, i just forgot to look at the file back when there was time to really get something together.

thanksgiving is def also a sex holiday

"stuffing"

food holidays: secular, communitarian, non-consumerist (other than, uh, food). a brief glimpse of the good life of reasonable and humble comforts.

all the food holidays mentioned thus far involve buying tons of unnecessary shit and are experienced through filters established by mass-media narratives absorbed since childhood. at this point thanksgiving works more to sell gym memberships, promote shares of hashtag turducken lol, and reinscribe discredited pilgrim mythologies than anything else. also the food is the most boring beige bland shit imaginable.

not in this family, bub

food holidays: secular, communitarian, non-consumerist (other than, uh, food).

Christmas?

uncomfortably our extolling of the food holiday is getting into some old man/old right type shit

though the secular aspect is important; i like thanksgiving so much because it's like christmas minus the jesus part.

Xmas is the worst imo because all the gift giving. cooking a meal together is much better than exchanging gifts.

sex holidays are about the body, desire, booze, cranking the speed on the hedonic treadmill for the night, a pagan ritual of leisure capital etc etc etc. New Years is the model. Valentine's Day. there are more and more of them now: St. Patrick's, Cinco De Mayo. and Halloween, a nauseating combo of a sex holiday and a children's holiday.

these are also more or less the ones where you're required to find them 'fun' and where if you don't have the fun you are bad

if you and yours can come to some kind of detente to not go apeshit on gifts it can be nice

i've given about the same thing to each of my family members for years and it's... well it's not great but it's ok. i don't have to think "oh shit i need to get a gift for x" it's more like "ok i need to go get [x's thing]"

xp

there was a year where due to some other shit going on in the family we didn't exchange gifts at all, by acclamation, and it was also widely agreed to be the nicest christmas we've ever had. ever since, i've brought no gifts while everybody else has lapsed back into doing it for no seeming reason. ugh.

these are also more or less the ones where you're required to find them 'fun' and where if you don't have the fun you are bad

they're the ones where you have the most space to define your own fun. assuming you have a social group that shares your sense of fun, which is...the point of finding your own social group. but the sense of obligation to ~party~ on NYE is nowhere near the sense of obligation surrounding the hell of a family xmas

even in college, i usually had a pretty boring new year's eve, which was fine. there was one that i enjoyed that just involved hanging around with a couple roommates, one of whom had his sister visiting, and watching dumb movies and having a few beers.

then in my mid-20s it became a thing to go out to events/bars or go to a large party, fight the crowds, all the drinking, and the annoyance of having to get home or stay somewhere random to wake up in for the new year

when i was a kid, we went to a few family-oriented parties but the best ones were when we'd rent a bunch of old movies, usually comedies, and eat snacks and hang out all evening. it was when i probably first saw my first marx brothers films, among others that are still favorites. i think i look back on my family new year's eve experiences the most fondly, really.

I grew up in a big white middle class family and my mother hates xmas passionately because there was an expectation that she was the one who had to do all the work to make it "special."

I've tried many times to no avail to get my family to do away with gift giving.

I associate New Year's Eve with staying at home (of course) watching twilight zone marathons with my dad. which is not at all bad but I was usually depressed anyway.

4th of July involved swimming and getting up to trouble. being outside. and for thanksgiving in Texas the weather was often gorgeous. happy memories of those holidays, the others feel like having to get dressed up for church (the only times we went) or having to go to a crowded mall to buy some junk for my sisters. St Patrick's day stands out for causing a lot of unreasonable anxiety as a small child. God forbid you forgot to wear green!

nye is pretty much just another night to be. I've had some amazing ones and done duds but really I place no importance on it whatsoever. I know some people who get bummed out because they build it up as this thing where they MUST have the BEST TIME EVER or it's a bust. Part of me thinks it has to do with how much you get out the rest of the year.

I think I would like halloween if I had kids. I managed to cobble together a half-decent "costume" from shit I got at the pound shop, but since you can't drink through a shit plastic mask it'll be taken off almost immediately

i bought party hats and a pregnancy test on the way to a new year's eve party once

tbh the former were kind of contingent on the latter but all was good

strong sense of apocalyptic doom giving this halloween an edge it's never had for me.

all uk holidays are bantz holidays i'm told

My theory, for what it's worth (i.e., considerably less than what you paid for it):

1) All holidays are rooted in religion to a greater or lesser degree. (Fourth of July and similar national days are about patriotism. Depending on the culture, patriotism is either bound up with religion or a secularized evolution of religion, at least as an expression of us versus "them.")

2) The various holidays identified here as "sex holidays" reflect the growth of industries eager to sell alcohol and/or other party-related paraphernalia. Case in point: Cinco de Mayo in Mexico is a national day. In the U.S. it's a pretext for brewers, distillers, and junk-food multinationals to sell a generically Hispanic-themed good time.

what about labor day

what about take your daughter to work day

the only two-day hangover i've ever had was the result of labor day

i realized tonight that goole must feel REALLY passionately abt this theory since he is loath to start threads

thanksgiving is the only good holiday

you clearly don't have to travel much i guess

correct - I just cook, ppl come over, plenty of good food in the refrigerator for a week thereafter.

IME, unmarried/childless people/couples turn food holidays into sex holidays (if that means actual sex or just drunkenness possibly leading to sex) when they can finally escape their families.

The worst holidays are those of forced frivolity - Halloween, St. Patrick's Day, New Year's Eve. Let the debauchery come from a wholesome place of letting off steam after having to talk to your parents for four hours straight.

I might be biased against those because they're also the amateur hour nights - whether you go to a party or a bar, the odds of running into a schmuck who can't handle his or her booze (becoming violent and/or annoying) is 300% higher than any other night of the year.

I like this dichotomy, but it's insufficiently judgemental.

Every holiday that isn't the one that you personally love preparing for and celebrating, where the celebrating includes some postprandial, presumably inebriated lovemaking, is a bullshit holiday, and the people who try to make it work are suckers who have bought into a lie.

That said, you shouldn't judge people for what they like. However, nobody, not even lovers, dads or moms likes the greeting card holidays, so we need to all do ourselves a favor and take Valentine, Mother and Father out behind the shed and apply a sharp axe, thrice, cleanly.

The NYC holidays that are the worst involves teeming hordes of smelly humanity making life here even more unbearable, so that means Christmas Season (six weeks in midtown), Halloween, and Gay Pride Sunday.

you're forgetting st pats day

trying to

ironically if you'd celebrate it they'd be able to help

Every holiday rules

Except Columbus Day, that can die in a fire

Yeah and Australia Day and similar

Feel like valentines day is the most objectively shit of the others for all the obvious reasons, the tacky heteronormative shit everywhere and the very concept of affection as annual obligation, but even then it's if not benign then certainly not worth expending energy telling off people that enjoy it

Let the debauchery come from a wholesome place of letting off steam after having to talk to your parents for four hours straight.

Some of my favorite memories involve going to a bar in my hometown on December 26th - all the friends and acquaintances who moved away (which is pretty much everyone) and came home to visit were finally free to get away from their families and go out drinking. New Years Eve was always a letdown by comparison.

Valentine's Day as a commercial enterprise is terrible.

Valentine's Day as an excuse to do something nice for whomever you are in a relationship with is A-OK with me.

Hate things so much, ugh

I love Halloween. I generally tolerate New Year's unless I'm in the right company to make it not feel like a marathon "keep up" fest.

Valentine's Day as an excuse to do something nice for whomever you are in a relationship with is A-OK with me.

― I Am Curious (Dolezal) (DJP), Saturday, October 31, 2015 7:48 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

like teabagging on a day where you typically wouldn't....

ugh agreed on Australia Day. beer and flags as capes and racist chest beating and the JJJ hottest 100 bleugh.

i vibe to the valuation of holidays in the op. except july 4th because jingoistic "proud to be an american" sentiment was rife where i grew up. and celebrating your country is profoundly weird to me. i enjoy eating and drinking at outdoor barbecues, though; i am not a monster.

halloween is the worst (i mean adult halloween; kids trick-or-treating is cute.) halloween was always sort of stressful for me even before i reached the age when suddenly halloween as an excuse to wear no clothes had become a thing. i am not creative or crafty, am a terrible actor, and basically feel like wearing a costume is lying. and everyone around me always seems to love halloween, and then i feel like a curmudgeon.

thanksgiving is the best. i think it was the easiest American holiday for my immigrant family to assimilate to: nothing objectionable to my religious parents and delicious food. whereas my dad in particular resisted the imperialism of Christmas hardcore.

(i think Christmas is beautiful and enjoy a voyeuristic relationship with it, but am grateful i don't have to go broke every year. my husband's family is the Christian-est, though, so this is slowly changing. i don't get gift-giving, really, another thing i choose to blame on my immigrant parents.)

on eid we just got money. and everyone just gives everyone money. like even little kids just get cash. it's so much simpler, guys!

actually now i'm starting to think my anxiety about coming up with a costume and coming up with thoughtful, meaningful gifts is similar. like they're usually read as an expression of your creativity/personality/self and it just seems like a lot of work to me. i realize this is probably more my neurosis than the holidays themselves.

actually now i'm starting to think my anxiety about coming up with a costume and coming up with thoughtful, meaningful gifts is similar. like they're usually read as an expression of your creativity/personality/self and it just seems like a lot of work to me. i realize this is probably more my neurosis than the holidays themselves.

― horseshoe, Sunday, November 1, 2015 8:32 AM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

same

i was on call last night and secretly relieved that i had an excuse to not participate in the festivities. coming up with a costume has always been stressful for me, i think in part because i ~like to think~ that i'm a creative/clever person who ~should~ be pretty good at costumes and i always leave it to the last minute and end up overcompensating and going with something almost insultingly low-concept and low-effort. like everyone's got amazing make-up and period-correct whatevers and i'm wearing a t-shirt that has "robot 3000" scrawled on it in sharpie

meanwhile my sister, excellent at gifts and costumes both, handmade a rainbow brite costume AND made something delicious for the party she went to

the way i got out of everything last night was by having to project rocky horror

wearing a costume is lying. and everyone around me always seems to love halloween

freedom to lie w/ impunity

even be rewarded for it

release valve for the daily run of lies required by modern life

yeah maybe! release valves make me nervous. except for the release valve of gluttony, which seems pretty benign.

coming up with a costume has always been stressful for me, i think in part because i ~like to think~ that i'm a creative/clever person who ~should~ be pretty good at costumes and i always leave it to the last minute and end up overcompensating and going with something almost insultingly low-concept and low-effort.

this approach worked well for me tbh and I'm not sure how an expensive, planned thing would have been better. The half-assedness adds value I think

Halloween is a food or at least food-ish holiday, even if you are old. I should go trick or treating next year even though we only had two people come to our door last night b/c it is not really a thing here. I last went trick or treating when I was 18 which I know is on the "mature" side but it was free candy & I'm cheap.

I think the holidays I hate are the ones that have "adult" expectations, like valentine's, mother's day, father's day. it's a holiday, I just wanna party

halloween is the worst (i mean adult halloween; kids trick-or-treating is cute.)

yesterday was the first Halloween I've ever spent in the US and it was rad. exhibitors at a zine fair during the day wearing horror makeup behind their tables and giving out mini-chocolate bars. almost everyone out in bars at night dressed up in costumes. fun.

halloween parties (ie, close friends, fun costumes) are dope. the commercial aspect of Halloween (ie theme park "Horror nights"/haunted houses) suck. not due to the parks as much as the assholes who attend these things.

costumes are not fun they're uncomfortable

halloween is for children. it's the law, isn't it? it should be.

Never liked Halloween. I never ate candy as a kid (still don't), therefore trick or treating made no sense to me.

My family are fun and I don't mind spending time with them. Hanging with my beloved nieces wears down my nerves after a couple of hours, though, so on Christmas I'm usually plotting my escape.

Before my friends started reproducing, what I loved most about Xmas was meeting at any open bar for or someone's apartment for drinks, smokes, dominoes, etc.

The best part of the Thanksgiving-Christmas nexus is the anticipation.

goole: your theory is correct

i like the costumes though, child or adult halloween. it's fun :-)

^shiroib4sketshoes

wabipiaf2ac

i realized tonight that goole must feel REALLY passionately abt this theory since he is loath to start threads

― j., Friday, October 30, 2015 7:38 PM (3 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm, turns out

totally feeling gbx on costume anxiety, the holiday totally puts me on the spot and makes me feel way less creative and interesting than i normally imagine i am. it's the blank-page problem.

I recall an episode of Jerry Springer in which a lady desires very much to have sex with food. She rubs the food on her clothes and says something like "must have sex with food." I wonder if she had costume anxiety.

finding the intersection, it's Candy Mac and Cheese for Sweetheart

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