The Ongoing and Hateful Expansion of Christmas/Xmas/Halloween Seasons

am i gonna go full gen-x? yes

we used to have seasons in the last third of the year, which perhaps involved leaves falling/american football/wistful memoirs of english public school lads reuniting with their chums

now we have six full weeks of #SpookySeason and two months of xmas crap.

also BLACK FRIDAY is an ongoing -- perhaps even weeks-long -- vibe rather than a referencing an actual day that humans might experience

i worked in bookstores for almost ten years; i never need to hear a christmas song ever again.

i'm told that some iconic britishes retailer (idk) already released its holiday advert a week ago.

the local brooklyn christmas tree stand has already opened a full week before (american) thanksgiving.

i mean yeah it's just endless capitalism! but it sucks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqiUAVUXPYU

I'm not even American, but my personal rule is that I don't want to hear a single Christmas song before U.S. Thanksgiving.

for me it feels these past few years have seen less of xmas starting early, but maybe it's just the circles i swing in.

The consumption has been getting ratcheted up and up, and the tat is getting tattier and plastic-ier and it's at a practically convulsive level as people's quality of, and stability in, life gets worse. I hate it, obviously. I'm on record being grouchy about seasonal decorations in multiple places on here. But I also don't think can keep getting infinitely worse and imo people are getting tired of it and/or increasingly can't afford to participate/it's just not papering over the chasm like it used to.

I don't really have people with those kind of shopping or consumption-centered priorities in my life, but in the last handful of years I've been in contact with a few of them via my ex. Every room, the whole garage, every storage area, CRAMMED with tacky seasonal stuff and excess decor to the point of not being able to live in their homes, in their own home spaces that should be for humans. It's dystopian.

Working with and talking to a lot of extremely lonely people, many of whom will be even more lonely over this period due to support/mental health services being on break/counsellors on holiday, i'd like to take every TV / online xmas advert featuring happy joyous perfect families and burn them all forever. Advertising creates enough waste as it is, but the human misery of this stuff for a month or even 2 months nowadays is fairly incalculable.

I am somewhat dispassionately curious about the reasons behind this. obvs CAPITALISM but like idk why are so many people so into Spooky Season or any of these mass cult holiday phenomena, is it phantom limb monoculture? Like with what in orbit just described: before we had holiday metastasis what would people like that have done instead, what cultural hole is it filling?

less chin-stroking: I HATE that Canada does Black Friday, absolutely pathetic wannabe loser shit, humiliating and insulting.

maybe it is just eating the slop that's forced on us through mass communications, Adorno was right!, pretty sad to think about in that case

Probably a lot of things? Happiness and satisfaction and a sense of security in life, having something to look forward to, some moments of enjoyment that you've "made it" and are living your life "right" and fitting in, have something to be proud of. Every positive emotion that can be supplanted by scarcity and anxiety and fear. Idk man it's kinda everything.

On a purely personal level, there's a home goods store that I really like, love the aesthetic, wish my whole life looked like that, IG ready oh yeah. I went there when my relationship was dying/dead and needed to be amputated, and I felt compulsive about finding things to make my life more beautiful and bring me pleasure. A year later I'd ended the thing and although my life was smaller, it was also pure and not overshadowed by my personal moral crisis, and I still thought the home goods were very nice but I didn't need any of them.

xp hm yes fair point!

I ask because obvs we need to fill that hole with more nourishing things, but uh I am staying p far from the thread now

Those w Capital know how bad the economy is going to get in the visible term and started the xmas protocols right after halloween to bleed you out before the soup lines

I felt compulsive about finding things to make my life more beautiful and bring me pleasure

Well put and relatable. I struggle to see halloween & xmas decor in that same light, but recognize that that's a matter of taste / upbringing, etc

decline of religious belief is a biggie

Do you think? Can you say more?

Ime people who consciously stop prioritizing religion in their lives are pretty happy about it but I could be persuaded that we are missing something like ritual or connection.

Black Friday started 2 weeks ago

religion is what I was handwaving at. but I often think the decline of religion explains a lot but/and absolutely don't think religion was a positive force in many people's lives, i.e., what are the underlying psychological and social needs driving religious belief? which io's "kinda everything" is the correct answer to, I think?

Xp - some of the early Black Friday sales are small independent retailers and craftspeople… like, it’s definitely a sign of economic badness, but it’s not just evil big amazon etc

what are the underlying psychological and social needs driving religious belief?

Yes. This is the question. Religion was created as a tool of power and made to be appealing to human psychological and social needs. It's not an accident that it works that way.

Xp i.o. and rob —- my mom was telling me about her friend who is this smart progressive woman who does prison ministry. And that’s … idk … a grim place, and faith/religion plays a different role than for the rest of us who aren’t incarcerated

I got beat up on in my friends online chat for pointing out how, whether b/c of Instagram or maybe because the last five years I take a walk ever morning, houses set up seasonal decorations earlier and more elaborately. I understand people need things to look forward to.

xxp Sorry, organized religion and specifically I'm saying Christianity which by default is probably? what you mean when talking about Americans' decline in observance, statistically speaking.

I meant decline of other common rituals (saints holidays, major feasts of the Church) where secular ones (and Christmas is secular now) take place.

I don’t want to participate in a discussion on religion because I think I am fundamentally at odds with most of you about whether the loss of common rituals was ultimately a good thing, and the loss of a common understanding of our place in the world around us was good or bad.

I think all of us could make a list of positive benefits religious practice can provide and a list of extremely terrible effects religious organizations have had over the millennia.

I don't see predominantly secular societies like the US swinging back to old-school religiosity any time soon — nor do I see more religious societies as better off. So I guess the question is how to get to a place where people can have things like a sense of purpose and meaning, community, moral and ethical guidance, material and emotional mutual aid, social rituals of celebration & mourning etc. from situations that aren't shot through with domination, mechanisms of shame & guilt, patriarchy/racism/casteism, economic exploitation — and aren't simply hollow capitalist echoes of these things.

xp I'm pretty open to the last two, I just found Christianity more damaging than helpful on the whole, as a made-up way to try to fill the need for rituals, icons, and uhh cosmology I guess you could say.

just found that Black Friday has been listed as a holiday on my google calendar

probably should simply be happy that they didn't block out two weeks for it

Xp Tbh Jesus gives me the creeps but i absolutely adore Sabta Claus and could maybe get behind a religion with Santa as its figurehead, he is so cuddly and jolly and kind. Some doublethink: i loathe overconsumption but giving presents is his love language, we would need to work on the "naughty or nice" thing tho. I could get down with a cult of Santa.

I'm just here for the hate

https://preview.redd.it/zfslkk1bp7w51.jpg?width=640&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=1f855239599699fbc13cd8691cdaab454aeba75d

yeah the 'reason for the season' is neither Sweet Jesus Christ (as intoned by Lena Horne), nor Santa Claus, nor making the kids happy

it's just buying stuff in an effort to make your kids not hate you

fortunately i, who was never given an atari and have no children, am totally above all that

i will say the Eartha Kitt song ‘Santa Baby’ makes me wince because she demands so many expensive gifts, it’s like what does she want anyway his blood? Poor lovely Santa. I just want him to come down the chimney so i can give him a big hug and a cookie.

Black Friday sales are a thing in the UK now. We used to have post-Christmas sales which began in January; they now begin on Boxing Day. Someone somewhere is likely trying to work out how to get us to adopt Thanksgiving.

Happiness and satisfaction and a sense of security in life, having something to look forward to, some moments of enjoyment that you've "made it" and are living your life "right" and fitting in, have something to be proud of.

I'd never thought of it this way. It's a really good point.

angels we have heard on high
telling us 'go out and buy'

Mariah Carey already in the Top Ten again

Apparently my town is some kind of holiday tourist destination - Montana's Christmas Village - but honestly I was just downtown and it wasn't all that overwhelming. We still have at least five weed dispensaries and two gun stores for a town of ~4500 people, so things can only get so cheery.

it's weird, the appearance of xmas decorations used to piss me off sooo much, but now i have absolutely zero response to any of it. some of the decorations are honestly pretty cute. i like the lights at night, best seen in the distance on a particularly dark night imo, blues and greens are my favorite. what i find myself missing the most this time of year is the almost physical presence of the kind of nighttime darkness you get far outside of metro areas.

what i find myself missing the most this time of year is the almost physical presence of the kind of nighttime darkness you get far outside of metro areas.

I have just moved from an apartment in a small cul-de-sac to a (rented, brand-new) house on an even smaller dead-end street, immediately bordering a state park, so I am now pretty much surrounded by 50- to 60-foot-tall pine trees and man, it gets so fucking dark and quiet at night. Last night I could literally hear it snowing. Shit is wild.

I could get down with a cult of Santa.

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/nylRtGiFxjw/maxresdefault.jpg

small lights at night are lovely (mainly the colored ones)

but the inflated characters are uniformly terrible even if they didn't require constant electricity

and the various xmas light 'contests' are among the purest and shittiest expressions of americanism

I have some newish neighbors - I think they have small children - but they've bought every garbage holiday thing that Home Depot stocks: inflatable things, grave markers, skeletons emerging from the ground, cheap gaudy lights.. it's not in view so I don't worry about it, but I just see waste and future landfill fodder

Mick Foley to thread

Learned reading the transcript of that Cunga/Tucker pod that there’s a satanist conspiracy to make Halloween a continuous, all year long

12-foot-tall skeletons or gtfo

well, skeleton santa

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTISF4ZwjMg

oh yeah, there's a house i pass by regularly that is fully into the inflatables. they go apeshit every halloween. i passed by one saturday morning in early october and witnessed a lone grandmother surveying the lawn. right on the cusp of the plastic and power onslaught. i imagine it's an attraction for the grandkids. i imagine most of those people are very shallow.

weirdly i think they decided to go in a different direction for xmas this year. there is a huge fake xmas tree structure in the yard and little else.

the mormons put on a famous light show on their church-owned block downtown. it's honestly a sight to be hold, they're very hardcore about it, countless huge trees are expertly wrapped. i just avoid that shit altogether now though, couldn't care less. give me a couple ambient touches of xmas lights zooming past my window on a dark cold night and i'm good.

(did you see any aurora(e) a week or two ago?)

nah, i saw it a few years ago so i'm good.

✔

I hate Christmas light house decorations, deeply and intentionally. Just plastic and fossil fuels as far as the eye can see and that's before people get in their cars and line up to drive through at a crawling speed in what is functionally a traffic jam. I'm not trying to convince those of you who like it, I'm just being curmudgeonly per this thread.

Every time someone says "Let's drive around and look at the lights!" I feel kind of sick at heart and I know I'm in enemy territory. No I am not capable of being "reasonable" about it.

There's a bland suburb of Fresno called Clovis... and there's a couple pretty affluent streets where they go apeshit over Xmas decorations... it's very competitive and just blocks and blocks of eyesore bullshit from Home Depot; very little crafted by hand, just shit ordered from Amazon etc. And everyone drives slowly up and down the streets, I was forced to do this with my ex & her mom, everyone oohs and ahhs and I just wanted to barf all over everything

Christmas lights are like a city fireworks show - seen em once, seen em forever.

The constant flow of online sales, monthly PRIME DAYS etc. has completely removed Black Friday from my consciousness. Unless Wal-Mart is handing out 80” TVs for $20 I can’t even imagine what people are busting down doors for anymore.

retails in the dumps, there were doing 'early black friday' sales and shit, I think big retail is pretty desperate these days

Black Friday...Small Business Saturday...Cyber Monday...Giving Tuesday...Leave Us The Fuck Alone Wednesday

Here's something. Per the Bluesky post that shared it a couple of days ago:

Pulling the most recent police log led me to once again see an incredible holiday decoration picture a cousin in Omaha sent me

https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:ssfjemvjvbjcx6tultmpciz2/bafkreiemm26i5ogrvjksvbryrdkoqgo67exrkm4m4d6qede64xz2kjywzu@jpeg

Yeah Black Friday lasts longer every year too!

I can't stop it or change it, so I try to disengage with all the noisy, obtrusive commercialism and the deluge of appeals from the non-profits we already gave to several months ago. This makes me resemble a hermit more and more each year. I'm fine with that. I find that being a part-time hermit is rather restful.

we were still on school holidays at the end of August when my local shop (Spar) started bringing out the Christmas chocolates etc. absolutely raging.

I LIKE feeling Christmassy but it's spoilt by it being background noise from September onwards. then Boxing Day ie 2nd day of the season it's all on the reduced aisle and they're selling detox rubbish and easter eggs.

and yes the mountains of plastic shite depresses me more every year. A relative of mine went to the Arctic circle and was cleaning up huge plastic novelty items out of the water up there.

Every time someone says "Let's drive around and look at the lights!" I feel kind of sick at heart and I know I'm in enemy territory. No I am not capable of being "reasonable" about it.

― Ima Gardener (in orbit), Wednesday, November 26, 2025 6:49 PM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

i love this fwiw. may nobody drag you along to look at the lights this year!

xp i feel like a 'cursed xmas inflatables' thread would be a great way to stare into the abyss

not far from my house, there's a German Xmas market every year at a German old folks home ('the Altenheim')... it's just handmade goods and weird german imports like sausages and all that kind of shit. Literally the only Christmassy thing I look forward to anymore, very uncommercial and old world, people playing accordions and kids with rosy cheeks and lederhosen, all that stuff

^^^ and beer, really good draught beer

I like when botanical gardens do a Christmas themed light show

There's a Halloween block party on my street tonight for the 5-and-under set. It's in its second year and was a big hit last year.

I have bought lots of different kinds of candy this year, which I've separated out into bags, and I carved a small pumpkin today to put a tea light into.

I loved the kids' costumes and especially the enthusiasm of the parents last year, and I also learned that in SF there is a disproportionate number of kids who have nut allergies, so I adjusted accordingly

I saw Halloween decorations on a few neighborhood houses even before October 1st this year. The Xmas "season" has already expanded about as far as it can be taken by retailers to the point where diminishing returns quickly transform into escalating backlash. Thanksgiving seems to be fairly immune from the forces that have driven the expansion of Halloween and Christmas. If anything, its domain is being eroded as extended family occupies less of our time an attention.

I've given up on fretting about this stuff. It's out of my hands anyway.

In the past year we’ve had several families with kids move into our neighborhood and I was looking forward to trick or treaters. Nope. One family came by and that was it. All of them went to other neighborhoods instead of building up their own. Even Preston, the little fucker that knocks on my door to pet my dog, wouldn’t come by for free candy. Go kick rocks, Preston.

we do not get very many trick-or-treaters in our trailer park, and because we always have the lights off and no decorations there has never been a stray knock on our door in years on halloween night. last night though we went to a little get together hosted by a gay couple we know. they have a house in a neighborhood of 3,000 sq ft single-levels, nice yards and mature trees, a little john hughes core, and there was just a constant stream of kids at the door until 9:30. i did not take a turn answering the door and was a little like an unsure cat after furniture is rearranged.

Dawwww I probably gave out candy to a hundred kids in Brooklyn yesterday and then handed the bowl to someone else and they saw 300 more trick-or-treaters come through! This neighborhood has an organized program where you sign up your house a few weeks ahead and they make a map for the "Halloween crawl" so parents know where there will be more density of participating homes. It's pretty great tbh.

My sister is mad/bummed bc her rural small town which SHOULD be prime trick-or-treating, she lives in a walkable residential area, there are sub-divisions where children should be roaming...got co-opted by the school district holding a "trunk or treat" parking lot thing. She already has their number, she called it the "stranger danger panic" and is so mad at leaders for enabling the manufactured fear.

Hate Trunk or Treats, especially when they do not fall on Halloween. My wife used to suggest that we take the kids to these in addition to Halloween, and I would refuse, on the principle that it made Halloween less special.

I caught a lil monologue about how trick-or-treating is really quite adventurous because for children their engagement with the world is so mediated by their parents, and this is an introduction to engaging with an adult you don't know, with a certain amount of independence, even though your parents are watching just behind you. I buy it.

yes and quite often my kids aren't out after dark (I am a low-effort parents in terms of evening activities lol) so that feels special to them when they're little.
we don't have many streetlights where we are so it's torch-lit a lot of the time. our village is great for trick-or-treat.

now that my kids are in their mid-late teens i’ve become a halloween grinch. like oh great the cool idea of costumes and mischief boiled down to a chaperoned single agreed evening where we beg for sugar snacks FANTASTIC no thanks no jackolantern at the front door go away.

i am not ruling out the possibility of becoming one of those adults who Gets Really Into It with my own gory costume and frightening sound effects that are triggered by the doorbell

Twice last night I saw parents car-stalking their kids as they walked through neighborhoods trick or treating. A couple of cute kids going door to door while the parents roll slowly ten feet behind them, headlights blasting through the spookiness. In one case it was four middle school boys in a gated community. What do they think is going to happen? What’s wrong with people?!?

i worked on Halloween and convinced three of my coworkers to join me in ghoul makeup. It was fun and the best thing about wearing creepy makeup is that you, the wearer, can't feel it and don't notice it (for the most part). The onus of dealing with looking at it is on the people who set their eyes upon you, which is especially fun if you work in a restaurant.

I also wore a cute wig that looked a little like classic Joan Crawford/the wig in Strait-Jacket.

That sounds good, La Lechera, and your telling makes me wish I was there!

I carved and lighted a pumpkin and put it on my stoop, which the younger kids were fascinated by, and I ended up giving out almost 10 lb of candy...as much to the parents and random adult singles and couples and groups walking by as to the kids. The really little kids only had the barest idea of what they were doing at most.

When I lived in the Castro and was working I kind of hated Halloween, since I often worked late and the traffic was bad and I couldn't find parking, and it was mostly just an adult party.

Now that I'm in a different neighborhood getting to see toddlers experience their first Halloween I'm very captivated