Opt out! Just OPT OUT PEOPLE. You absolutely can, and if you have the privilege to opt in, choosing to NOT DO IT relieves people who are poor, or single parents, or simply fucking tired of the burden of keeping up. Your child will not die because the leprechaun did not visit or do some...whatever it is this newest thing is supposed to do (yes, I'm a parent, and no, I have no idea what this is), and in fact, will be a better person if we do not orchestrate every fantastical opportunity in their lives. They can do it themselves. For hours. With nothing more than old baking supplies and a cardboard box, if we let them have the time.
Consumerist capitalist bullshit relies on people trying to keep up with the Joneses, and this is nothing more than that. Guess what? That stupid elf doesn't come to our house, because it's paternalistic and also dumb and my daughter at 4 was smart enough to get that when I gave it a hard no in preschool. She still believes in many, many magical things, but she doesn't think we have to buy anything to make sure they exist or give her stuff.
Yes, the elf also does not visit our house. I have clearly stated that the elf is "a game parents play and it's a lot of work for parents and we don't do that". Also, the naughty list isn't real. Ditto for leprechaun traps. Why are we allowing ourselves to be sucked into this holiday arms race while drowning?
I feel like some of what makes opting out harder is “traditions” seem to come out of nowhere. Like in my upper Midwest childhood some of the things my mom said no to partly because like we weren’t Swedish so Santa Lucia wasn’t our thing. Leprechauns weren’t more that the Lucky Charms guy. St. Nicholas day was not a tradition in our German family. It’s definitely not cultural appropriation, but I think there is some value in seeing that your family doesn’t have to DO ALL THE THINGS. We did an egg tree, because I think my mom liked it. Plus, raising kids with the idea that every cool thing on earth isn’t theirs to do is good. Understanding that it’s fun to be invited to your friend’s Seder is awesome, but the deciding to do a Christian Sedar is not ok, is valuable.
We don't even do Santa, my kid is fine. I think living in the city helps a bit and having many, many childless friends because we don't even know about elves or leprechauns. I am learning live in this thread all the ways I'm rejecting cultural expectations 😆
Me too, and I have a 15 year old and a 19 year old. I had no idea of all the things I wasn't doing until this thread. My kids would always ask me if Santa was real and I would always answer, "Santa- the man in the red suit is made up however, the feeling you get when you give someone your time, your love, help them in some way, or give them something that means a lot to them either because they are in need or its simply a dream of theirs- that is what Santa is- its that feeling of joy from giving- and that is very real. "
Thank you! I’m printing out this pep talk for whenever I feel bad. We get a tree, decorate it with fun ornaments we’ve gathered over the years, and bake cinnamon rolls.
This is all true, but the kids enjoy that box and those baking supplies if you spend those hours building with them. The problem is, we are such slaves to capitalism, we don’t have that time and so we buy the gimmicks to alleviate our guilt. Would I rather spend the afternoon building a leprechaun trap with my kids or writing a stupid brief? Definitely the leprechaun trap! But I’m stuck in the time suck that is late stage capitalism.
I mean, sure. First wave feminism failed because it was co-opted by the time suck that is capitalist production ethos. We could have all been working 20 hours a week with full health insurance and ample time with our kiddos for all genders of parents but noooooo. In exchange, all our cars have computer screens on the dash. Taa daa!
Give me a 20 hour work week and all of the extra time to hang out with my family, then I will happily make all of the leprechaun traps and daily elf on the shelf scenes!
Not sure why we are demonizing all of the fun of sprawled out holidays and not demonizing the real time suck of late stage capitalism.
You nailed it. The real problem isn't the leprechaun traps but that late stage capitalism takes up the majority of our time so we don't have the time to make the leprechaun traps.
Thanks for talking about this! Our kids are in college, and I remember thinking as a SAHM “Christmas with little kids is all the stuff you do every.single.day then notched up 1000%.” It didn’t help that for a decade my awesome spouse and true partner who really enjoys Xmas worked at UPS, and man, nothing kills the holiday spirit like working at UPS! I see a family on our small street have a need/desire to ramp up every holiday in a Martha Stewart way and the mom especially can’t seem to connect her perfectionism with her exhaustion. I feel sorry for her, and am also glad my kids aren’t the same ages as her kids cuz I’d be having some regular self-talks with myself (and my kids!) about why I don’t go down that path. As an aside, our house now grills hot dogs at the end of our driveway on Halloween during the T or T hours. We still give out candy, but the hot dogs in a bun (with ketchup, mustard & relish available) are a hit! And we bring out our water cooler and small cups and you wouldn’t believe how thirsty kids get. And it’s fun for us, and I feel like it’s a way to create community with our neighbors and strangers alike.
I feel ya. My parents worked the hotel/restaurant industry (a huge crush during The Holidays) and in a hospital. (Mom would work through Hanukkah and Christmas so the other nurses could take that time off.) As a 20-something, I work retail during that time. Even so, I can't imagine working UPS during that crush!
Not the same as being a nurse, fire-fighter, police but I worked at Starbucks for 12 years and my gawd!!!! Everyone and their grandmother comes into SB on Thanksgiving and Christmas. I used to get so angry about it! It is for this reason I do not and never will go shopping on Thanksgiving or Black Friday weekend- Can't those folks just have the friggin day off to be with their friends or family or both?
I distinct remember working at Starbucks on a Christmas Eve that happened to fall on a Monday. Our manager didn’t connect the dots and didn’t staff for it. I worked in a very busy downtown seattle store. We were demolished, lines out the door with only 3 people working and customers complaining to me that the cafe side looked gross. And when I tried to close the door at closing time, people begged me to stay open! As if I hadn’t spent 9 hours with no breaks! But “where is your Christmas spirit?!” Was shouted at me. I worked for a few more years at Starbucks and generally still have a good feeling, but I never worked close on a Christmas Eve again. And I will never EVER go into a store on a Christmas or thanksgiving or Labor Day again. People are absolute monsters.
It’s so interesting to me, I also worked at Starbucks for a while, and I always felt like, “if I had to work, the busier the better!” It made the shift go more quickly - plus, we were usually getting time-and-a-half for holidays back then. Certainly, if there was zero demand, and they would close on those days, that would be ideal, but failing that, busy was my preference! But I also worked at a really bananas store...
Yes. Busier better. However, there is a tipping point- an angle of repose where it all starts to slip out of control- but that wasn’t the point I was making. I wasn’t resentful of it being busy. It was more about how unawares both the company and the patrons were of the fact that we were working on a Holiday that was meant to be a break from work and so clearly was for those in the store who weren’t working.
I worked customer service call center for online flower retailer in college and you better believe that put me off Mothers Day and Valentines Day! (Mothers Day was by far the worst. More people have a mother than a valentine and those relationships are WAY more emotionally fraught!!)
I feel like the holiday spread is also “us”, as a society of consumers, trying to use holidays to make us feel something. If Christmas is magic, then let’s have MORE magic for longer. But, to your point, I think, making it longer and more complex - loaded with STUFF - robs the actual magic and tradition from it. By the time the holiday arrives, you’re spent - the magic is blown.
I have a 5 yo, and we are trying hard to keep the balance. We also have a small house. Part of the holiday joy is the tradition of bringing out the same things (decorations) year over year. If you change them/add to them dramatically each year, you dilute the affection and connection you create with the “old” things. I also tell my kid that the Elf of the Shelf isn’t interested in our family, because he’s a really good kid. 😂
That’s really good! I just refuse to do elf on the shelf, leprechaun nonsense. I told my son when he asked about something “you have two working parents…”
I mean...yeah, that's exactly why I celebrate months-long Christmas, because I'd rather have magic than depression. I lived a life where Christmas magic was contained to a small window in December, with a super hectic Christmas Eve and Christmas, and it was terrible for my depression and anxiety. Now it is spread out and I have something to look forward to for weeks before and after the 24th and 25th.
My daughter is 3 and when she was a baby she was gifted two Elf on the Shelf dolls by my cousin. I pulled them out for the first time last year and we play with them like regular toys and she loves them. We don't do it the "correct" way but who cares - she creates the adventures for them and I play along and that is our tradition, which is so much less stressful for me and is super fun for her.
I love that Elf explaination! So much better than mine - it’s fake and costs a lot of money that I’d rather use to buy you an actual Christmas present.
Reminds me of the 1940 “Mother Makes Christmas” picture book by Cornelia Meigs and illustrated by Lois Lenski, which must have been from my mother’s childhood. One woman wrests an amazing feast and a decorated room out of a rough New England storm. And her daughter has seen her destiny. When I recall my mother actually throwing Christmas ham across the kitchen c. 1986 in a sort of black-out stress rage, it all starts to make sense.
Another theory. The shrinking size of households AND the infrequency with which we spend time with extended family has left us with a huge reserve of ‘family time’ easily converted to buying decorations and over decorating more holidays...it’s the slow creep of capitalism replacing actual family interactions.
I think it’s also converting time people spent making things like celebratory foods, hand made costumes and decorations into buying stuff. Old fashion Christmas baking for instance is relatively cheap in money, but time consuming and fussy. Traditional Scandinavian American baking is “how many ways can we make butter, eggs, sugar, and flour into slightly different foods.” If you buy them, then you have so much more time to spend money on other things!
It’s totally this. As a full time attorney with three small kids, I was just telling my friends “I have no time, but I have money. So I can buy but I cannot make.” And so what would normally be a wonderful restful time of bonding and making things together (people used to decorate their trees with popcorn and candy canes and sugar cookies on strings!!), we “outsource” it all for the appearance of an authentic restful bonding period that we used to have generations ago and we call it “tradition.”
yes! Between work, commuting, kid extracurriculars, and life, I don't have a full day to make no-waste holiday decorations, but I sure as shit can order some while I eat at my desk or drop a kid at taekwondo or robotics or basketball.
I wonder if this is a headlong crash of three American ideals into each other: the nuclear family, the Protestant Work Ethic, and FOMO. I say that, because it's - again - a slightly bewildering cultural phenomenon that I feel like I'm looking at from the outside, mostly for cultural reasons.
I grew up with sprawling holidays as a matter of family history - Ramadhan is an entire month. But you're not expected to arrange the celebration in a small unit - the nuclear family with the mother as project manager. The celebration may sprawl the month, but so too does it sprawl among people and places. There always - my entire life - felt like there was a work ethic to planning for, executing and then reviewing Christmas holiday gatherings, whether at school, work, or through hobby organizations. It was a annual event, budgeted for, with committees and commitments, planning and procedures. The FOMO thing may be a new internet-mediated-culture aspect of this, highly targeted to parents. As a couple without children, my hubby and I just never hear about these rapidly changing expectations for parents until months later when we chat with our friends who are parents. And then we're like... wha?
As an aside, I grew up with an intense outside pressure to participate in two holidays that were not a part of my family's cultural tradition: Christmas and Easter. We moved too often for my mom to be successfully pressured to be a PTA parent that brought the cookies and cakes and decorations and planned the parties for free for the school district. (This was the 1970s and 80s, btw.) So, we were able to kinda ignore it until the cultural pressures (for me to join the school choir, to bring Christmas presents for fellow students, to bring something to eat at the during-school-hours party, the endless questions of why my parents didn't "let me" celebrate Christmas) that my parents just gave in and did the minimum to participate in non-secular school festivities and allow me a stress-free winter at school.
They then picked up the secular, consumer aspects of Christmas and transferred it to New Years so my parents could avoid the cultural pressures they were getting to attend office holiday parties full of alcohol. It was easy at the time to just tell people we celebrated New Years with family and presents. I guess others thought it was some other kind of unfamiliar religious practice of ours?? The equivalent of the folks who celebrated Hanukkah instead of Christmas? (I felt such kinship with my Jewish classmates. I was never pressured to participate in their cultural traditions as if it was mine, but I was invited to join in and be present or be witness a few times. It's so hard to describe the difference, but latter felt joyous, welcoming and full of friendship. The former does not.)
So many thoughts about this one and not enough time to express it!
I identify with SO much of this. I am Jewish, and I always dread the Christmas season. I find it super off putting when people insist Christmas is secular, honestly. If you're not celebrating the birth of Christ, whose name is right there in the holiday, you're basically left with buying stuff. (Many people would say they're celebrating friends and family, but the focus culturally is far more on what you're BUYING them vs. celebrating being with them.) I understand many people who celebrate the holiday aren't religious, but that does not make Christmas a secular holiday.
I grew up in an area without many Jewish people, and in *public school* I was pressured into singing sacred music in choir, Christmas pageants, etc... I was always being treated like I was ridiculous if I did not participate in overtly religious celebrations. And I come from a liberal city. I can't imagine what non-Christians in other parts of the country face.
Now I face similar dilemmas when people give me Christmas presents because I do not want to be forced into Christmas gift giving, but there is the expectation of reciprocity. There are work secret Santas, white elephants, Christmas parties masquerading as holiday parties, and all kinds of not technically mandatory, but basically mandatory Christmas celebrations. It puts non-Christians in a position to have to either participate and spend a bunch of money and devote a bunch of time to a holiday they don't celebrate, OR they have to single themselves out and become thought of as a Scrooge.
For my Christian-adjacent stepkids, we have a Christmas tree, listen to Christmas music, watch Christmas movies, drive around and look at Christmas lights, and we open presents with family. I drew the line at Elf on the Shelf though, and we don't do any of the other stuff either. Their mom's side does a lot of that stuff, but my partner and I do not participate, even though the kids try to get us to do more. We do PLENTY. It already costs a lot of money and time to do what we do, and I'm so grateful my partner sees things like I do and sets those expectations for the kids so I don't have to be the bad guy.
I have absolutely nothing to base this on except a hunch, but I think we are only a year or two away from white, non-Hispanic Americans (of which I am one) co-opting Dia de los Muertos because “the decorations look fun” and it’s an opportunity for yet another holiday season with decor and food and activities.
Last week I had a (white, male, New Englander) colleague chuckle and tell me it's a good thing we scheduled our Breakfast fundraiser for Cinco de Mayo and not the day after. In New Hampshire. I just blinked at the screen a few times.
To my surprise, I don't hate it. I know a couple white folks who used to live in Texas and Mexico respectively and they earnestly participate because they lost people. It seems to help them. Our public library had an ofrenda set up for everyone in the community, too. I don't know. Someone tell me why I'm wrong!
Only speaking for myself here - and Dia de los Muertos is not
my culture - but I would draw a distinction between appreciating an opportunity to mourn those lost, and honoring them with an ofrenda; versus JUST appropriating the distinctive skulls + bright colors variation on “spooky season.” I would love for someone (s) Mexican/of Mexican heritage to share their thoughts!
Target had a Dia de los Muertos campaign this year. Got a special email about it and they had an artist who was selling her decorations and activities.
As both a Jewish woman AND a retail worker, the Christmas season is exhausting. The retailer I work for famously doesn't put out decorations until after Thanksgiving (but minor signage is starting already) and a friend in a different state tells me he received COMPLAINTS yesterday, (Nov 5, to be exact) because the store isn't decorated. Who has that much time on their hands to actually complain to another human being that there is no Christmas tree or holiday music a few days after Halloween? I was in a home goods store the week of October 15 and they had Christmas music on the soundtrack already, which was weird to me. Good luck to retail workers everywhere!
As a somewhat religious Christian, super early Christmas feels well bonkers. We have a whole liturgical season (Advent) that leads up to Christmas, that doesn’t even start until 4 Sundays before Christmas. And Christmas itself lasts until Epiphany (Jan 6 or the Sunday after that). My family celebrates on that rhythm still, so I find the idea that you pack up Christmas Dec 26 because it’s “been around so long” odd.
I grew up Catholic and always celebrated from Advent to Epiphany but have now stretched Christmas into a whole season from November 3rd (after All Saints and All Souls Days) to Imbolc/Candlemas/Groundhog Day at the end of January/beginning of February. (I still go most hardcore from Black Friday to Epiphany.) The Catholic church I grew up it actually puts up their Christmas trees in the fall and decorates them with leaves through Thanksgiving, which I think is brilliant. I now am a Unitarian Universalist and find a lot of meaning in the Wheel of the Year and the blending of Wicca with Catholic and Christian traditions. There's a lot of spiritual meaning, but also, the Wheel of the Year grounds me into the seasons and celebrating life and I love sprawling the holidays throughout the year.
As someone who has struggled for the majority of my life with depression and anxiety, and now has chronic physical health problems, having sprawling, months-long holiday celebrations gives me joy to make it through the days and weeks. I am so excited that November is a fun mix of the end of fall with the beginnings of Christmas - last weekend we went to a local craft fair and bought Christmas gifts and got Christmas photos taken; this weekend I'm doing a fall 10K walk/run; next weekend singing in a fall choir concert and getting Santa photos; the following weekend Thanksgiving. Instead of beginning to sink into seasonal depression I am full of joy because of the sprawled holidays.
The pandemic has had the opposite effect on my (admittedly childless, now) family. We were so sad, Christmas 2020, that we couldn't gather. My parents were in their 70s, my young adult kids were far away, and we all thought it would be awful. We did miss each other, but we did not miss all the things we didn't do because we weren't traveling and gathering. Later, my mom and I both admitted that it was actually kind of nice. Restorative. Easy. Last year was the same thanks to the Delta variant surge, a winter storm, and our abundance of caution with my parents. This year, my daughter and her husband will be here, with just my husband and I. We're planning a day of reading, puzzling, playing board games, watching movies, and eating really good food. We're not exchanging gifts, having used the money I'd normally spend on them to fly her husband here from Europe. (They are in visa limbo/hell; long story.) Sometime after the holiday, my husband and I will make the drive to my parents, when the NW weather is cooperating and we've had some days away from his exposure to masses of high school students. It's not the kind of holiday I grew up loving--and which my mom and I spent many years missing, as our extended family died/scattered--but we're really looking forward to it. It feels almost subversive to celebrate like this (bonus), and empowering in this world where we feel increasingly powerless.
Another layer: if your work outside the home is in any way related to consumerism, the dreaded Q4 becomes an entire season of heightened stress and activity, trying to sell to the consumer during this holiday “season” that now starts Oct 1.
As a mom with 4 littles, I decided I didn’t want work to be more stressful during this already hectic season, which is why I shut down my product business.
I get this. I don't have kids, and I am now retired, but when I was working (at the head office of a major Canadian bank), October through January was, hands down, our busiest time of year, with year-end reporting, annual report, employee annual report, corporate social responsibility report, holiday messaging, spring annual meeting of shareholders to plan and prep for, etc. etc. I had to decide what was the bare minimum I needed to make the holidays feel special, and what I could cut out. For example, we always put up a Christmas tree but Christmas baking was put on the back burner for years. I always felt resentful, because there was so much I WANTED to be doing (and so much that I felt I was SUPPOSED to be doing), but I just could not keep up.
At this risk of being a little provocative here - This conversation about expanding holiday consumption/ performance always rubs me very much the wrong way. And so today I've been thinking about why and landed on this: We've gotten a lot better at, for example, not saying 'all people' when we mean 'all white people' or 'all upper-middle-class people' I think the reason this conversation rankles is because I think many people (AHP today maybe included) say "all people' when they mean "all Christian people" (or people who grew up in a Christian tradition/culture).
So I think my initial response on Twitter was identifying a smaller piece of this bigger whole thing that bothers me.
I personally know no Jews (who clearly identify as such) who do this over-the-top holiday stuff, even for holidays that they do celebrate like Halloween & Thanksgiving. I would imagine people from some other religious or cultural affiliations maybe feel the same way?
And maybe I'm totally wrong! I would love to hear other thoughts on this.
Love this provocation and I am very curious to hear others' thoughts — in the comments here and on Discord, I wonder how much of the embrace has to do with efforts to lean into "American" (read: Christian) assimilation, to perform "belonging," etc etc. I also wonder how much has to do with what you also said earlier today on Twitter re: absence of Santa/Easter Bunny/other "imaginary" creations in Jewish culture
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg wrote about her family's approach to Halloween which she considers to be entirely secular now. I can't give you the link, however. It's her "Life is a Sacred Text" site, I think.
You have to set boundaries. This is easier when you live in a diverse place, because not every family will be taking part in every single type of celebration. My classes had Jehovah’s Witnesses and Jewish kids and Muslim kids and kids of Korean descent, and they definitely were absent from some of Christian-focused celebrations. Even if you don’t have an excuse based on religious grounds, you have one based on family values and what you feel you can spend. Yes, peer pressure can be stiff, but once you start saying no, and explain why to your kids, they will understand even if they grumble.
So true. We choice-enroll our son into a Title I school because of their autism program. There is a noticeable difference in expectations of the families at that school (who have more racial, religious, and socioeconomic diversity) than the friends of our similarly white and socioeconomically-advantages friends on Facebook. Also, my autistic son often doesn’t feel the need to conform to expectations, and that’s been so freeing in terms of not getting comments like “but the elf on the shelf visits [classmate]!”
Hot take: I actually like the sprawl of Halloween and Christmas because it actually feels LESS stressful to me as a mom to a 3 year old to have everything spread out over the course of months rather than everything jammed into one weekend or weekday.
Oh god, as a kid we had to shove multiple stops to see all the relatives into one day for Halloween and Thanksgiving and two days for Christmas Eve and Christmas and it was so exhausting!!! Now we just spread it out throughout the month. I like having four different days of big Christmas celebrations because that means the days are more relaxed. My dad’s extended family does the Saturday before Christmas, we celebrate Christmas Eve as an immediate family and with our church family, Christmas Day brunch with my mom’s extended family, evening Christmas Day dinner with my in-laws, and the Saturday after Christmas with my mom and my brother’s family. It is so much more relaxed than having to try to make time for all of those people on the 24th and 25th!!! Yes, we have 2 stops on Christmas Day, but they’re only 10 minutes away from each other geographically so it’s not a big deal.
We also take advantage of doing a different activity tradition with a different set of relatives or friends over the course of two months for Fall/Halloween (Sept and Oct) and Christmas (Nov and Dec). So seeing the family and friends becomes the primary thing and the activity the secondary thing that has the bonus of creating a tradition with those people. For example, we spend Halloween with Mom/Grammy by going to Trick-or-Treat on Main Street the Saturday before, then with my in-laws at the local Trail-or-Treat the Sunday before, and then we spend Halloween with my daughter’s best friend and her family on Halloween night by trick-or-treating around the neighborhood. We spend Halloween with another close friend and her family by going to the corn maze together in early October (although I would be more than fine to push that up to September next year so that we don’t have an activity every weekend in October!) We get to celebrate fall with cousins at the local Fall Festival in September.
It only feels like extra pressure because capitalism makes full time workers only have eight days off a month, and we still need time to do domestic stuff and to rest and recover, so time is limited and precious. Also, because social media and general life social pressure makes us feel like we need to keep up with the Joneses.
So yeah, make fun of me for signing up to see Santa on Sunday Nov 20th, but then we don’t have to shove it into another December weekend day with something else.
Thank you for this. My husband and I are both children of divorce and there were years pre-pandemic when we were expected to have, I am not joking, three entire Thanksgiving meals in one day. We used the baby as an excuse to scale back in '19 and just haven't fully returned to the treadmill of it all since the pandemic.
But this year, we're trying to reconstitute something for Thanksgiving, probably hosting some of the grandparents at our house.
Halloween sprawl was feeling like it was going to overtake my life last month - a pumpkin stroll at school, trunk or treat on day, pumpkin stroll through town the next, costume parade at school, and then trick or treat? Yipes. We just opted out of some things, and I'm grateful my kid is too young to really understand her own options, or peer pressure or FOMO and I control her schedule.
BUT THEN! Halloween was the day RSV finally caught up to my kid, and we spent the post-school hours at the dr's and then the pharmacy, so the fact that she didn't get to go officially trick or treating has me a little bummed, but she definitely got to do Something in her costume.
Ugh, I do not miss being expected to have three entire holiday meals in a day (and being made to feel guilty because I was too stuffed to eat anything at the third house!) I'm just really grateful that as an adult my family is much more flexible about holidays not needing to happen on the exact calendar date. I enjoy them so much more and love that we still get to see everyone without feeling so rushed.
With my daughter being only 3, I also get to control her schedule which means I opted us out of things in order to keep us from running ragged. The cool thing is that while she loved the selected activities we did outside the house, she also loves reenacting them with her stuffies inside the house! They have been going to the carnival and the playground and on pony rides and trick-or-treating now for weeks!!
Oh, and one more thing: having multiple Halloweens means that kids can pick multiple costumes for multiple days if they’d like. My daughter got to be a scarecrow at the county fair and a witch at the Renaissance Festival and Peppa Pig for Halloween. Last year she was a cowgirl and a ladybug for Halloween.
Again, I can see how adults would turn this into a Joneses contest, but kids just love dressing up and the opportunities to be different things!!!
Also can we unpack the childhood magic thing? I’m just mulling over the relationship between this all right now. Childhood is so decidedly not magic what with school shootings and the number of kids affected by the opioid epidemic not to mention the pandemic and climate change and, and ….
I work in adolescent mental health and so have a front row seat to the crisis. Is it like “we will focus on bunnies and leprechauns and Santa because the rest is impossible to fix”?
Oh that’s a really interesting perspective! It’s easy as adults sometimes to just roll our eyes at the commercialization of these holidays, but how to seek out the balance of making something special for kids (and us, hopefully) in the midst of so much despair?
I’m definitely of two minds about this though. On the one hand I can see why it would happen. On the other I tend to think young people are wiser than we give them credit for and they’d like to have safe schools and homes and a habitable planet more than “holiday magic”. Wouldn’t they all be better served if we acknowledged that hard things are happening and will happen, but we’ll get through it together, and then like passed some gun laws? Rather than the elf getting into shenanigans.
I've been reading the fascinating and of-its-time book Last and First Men by Stapledon (1930). One of the interesting ideas in the book is that in America what is worshipped more than anything else is 'movement' - the need to be constantly producing and consuming and above all *moving*. This leads in his fantasy to a a future where everyone has an 'aeroplane', taking in flocks to the sky on holidays to literally worship motion, and doing so even when the consumption of fuel dooms them to freeze and starve. Pretty apt metaphor imo.
Both increasing secularism and increasing Evangelical co-option makes this fascinating to me.
Like Advent is actually a fairly significant part of certain Christian traditions. During my childhood some people got Santa Advent Calendars, but Jesus ones where the doors opened to reveal little bit of manger scene or a little bit of a manger scene and a Bible verse leading up to Christmas were common.
And while, I 100% do not care about your beer Advent calendar. I do find it strange that people don’t know it’s actually Christian in origin and think it’s appropriate for public schools, government offices and secular workplaces. (And if you work in retail or something where a countdown to Christmas is important, I recommend just calling whatever prizes you are using to make it through the hellscape that is December “a countdown to Christmas”)
Lots of people celebrate secular Christmas, and that is fine. But when people start insisting to people who did not grow up marinating in Christian culture that it’s not a religious holiday so can totally take over public spaces that is weird.
Especially, when we have actual Christian Nationalists trying to run things. And part of that is trying to enforce mandatory Christian culture. So rather than transferring the bit of public land that a historic WWI memorial Peace Cross sits on to the VFW to keep up, we have the Supreme Court blathering about the cross not being a religious symbol so it’s totally cool on public land.
I do not care at all if you have decided Christianity is nonsense, but wear the cross a family member gave you. Or have an icon on display because it has meaning to you. Christians really can’t complain about appropriation.
The advent calendar bits in AHP’s essay made me chuckle because last year I bought my kids a Lego Avengers advent calendar (classic trying to overcompensate for COVID-limited Christmas via buying stuff) and my husband, raised very Catholic, was horrified: “They’re supposed to have Bible verses in them, not toys!”
Basically, co-opt Christian holidays all you want for you and your family. You are entitled to. But beware of people using that to take other people’s rights away and enforce a veneer of mandatory Christianity.
Oh, the advent calendar! My Scandinavian grandmother would send me one every year - the family on that side is Lutheran. I'd learn when celebrations were supposed to begin, and why from a religious perspective. Those family religious traditions were meaningful to me. I see them now and intensely miss my grandmother. I don't miss anything about the secular celebrations we were pressured into in school.
Opt out! Just OPT OUT PEOPLE. You absolutely can, and if you have the privilege to opt in, choosing to NOT DO IT relieves people who are poor, or single parents, or simply fucking tired of the burden of keeping up. Your child will not die because the leprechaun did not visit or do some...whatever it is this newest thing is supposed to do (yes, I'm a parent, and no, I have no idea what this is), and in fact, will be a better person if we do not orchestrate every fantastical opportunity in their lives. They can do it themselves. For hours. With nothing more than old baking supplies and a cardboard box, if we let them have the time.
Consumerist capitalist bullshit relies on people trying to keep up with the Joneses, and this is nothing more than that. Guess what? That stupid elf doesn't come to our house, because it's paternalistic and also dumb and my daughter at 4 was smart enough to get that when I gave it a hard no in preschool. She still believes in many, many magical things, but she doesn't think we have to buy anything to make sure they exist or give her stuff.
Yes, the elf also does not visit our house. I have clearly stated that the elf is "a game parents play and it's a lot of work for parents and we don't do that". Also, the naughty list isn't real. Ditto for leprechaun traps. Why are we allowing ourselves to be sucked into this holiday arms race while drowning?
I feel like some of what makes opting out harder is “traditions” seem to come out of nowhere. Like in my upper Midwest childhood some of the things my mom said no to partly because like we weren’t Swedish so Santa Lucia wasn’t our thing. Leprechauns weren’t more that the Lucky Charms guy. St. Nicholas day was not a tradition in our German family. It’s definitely not cultural appropriation, but I think there is some value in seeing that your family doesn’t have to DO ALL THE THINGS. We did an egg tree, because I think my mom liked it. Plus, raising kids with the idea that every cool thing on earth isn’t theirs to do is good. Understanding that it’s fun to be invited to your friend’s Seder is awesome, but the deciding to do a Christian Sedar is not ok, is valuable.
We don't even do Santa, my kid is fine. I think living in the city helps a bit and having many, many childless friends because we don't even know about elves or leprechauns. I am learning live in this thread all the ways I'm rejecting cultural expectations 😆
Me too, and I have a 15 year old and a 19 year old. I had no idea of all the things I wasn't doing until this thread. My kids would always ask me if Santa was real and I would always answer, "Santa- the man in the red suit is made up however, the feeling you get when you give someone your time, your love, help them in some way, or give them something that means a lot to them either because they are in need or its simply a dream of theirs- that is what Santa is- its that feeling of joy from giving- and that is very real. "
Thank you! I’m printing out this pep talk for whenever I feel bad. We get a tree, decorate it with fun ornaments we’ve gathered over the years, and bake cinnamon rolls.
This is all true, but the kids enjoy that box and those baking supplies if you spend those hours building with them. The problem is, we are such slaves to capitalism, we don’t have that time and so we buy the gimmicks to alleviate our guilt. Would I rather spend the afternoon building a leprechaun trap with my kids or writing a stupid brief? Definitely the leprechaun trap! But I’m stuck in the time suck that is late stage capitalism.
I mean, sure. First wave feminism failed because it was co-opted by the time suck that is capitalist production ethos. We could have all been working 20 hours a week with full health insurance and ample time with our kiddos for all genders of parents but noooooo. In exchange, all our cars have computer screens on the dash. Taa daa!
YEPPPPPPP.
Give me a 20 hour work week and all of the extra time to hang out with my family, then I will happily make all of the leprechaun traps and daily elf on the shelf scenes!
Not sure why we are demonizing all of the fun of sprawled out holidays and not demonizing the real time suck of late stage capitalism.
You nailed it. The real problem isn't the leprechaun traps but that late stage capitalism takes up the majority of our time so we don't have the time to make the leprechaun traps.
Thanks for talking about this! Our kids are in college, and I remember thinking as a SAHM “Christmas with little kids is all the stuff you do every.single.day then notched up 1000%.” It didn’t help that for a decade my awesome spouse and true partner who really enjoys Xmas worked at UPS, and man, nothing kills the holiday spirit like working at UPS! I see a family on our small street have a need/desire to ramp up every holiday in a Martha Stewart way and the mom especially can’t seem to connect her perfectionism with her exhaustion. I feel sorry for her, and am also glad my kids aren’t the same ages as her kids cuz I’d be having some regular self-talks with myself (and my kids!) about why I don’t go down that path. As an aside, our house now grills hot dogs at the end of our driveway on Halloween during the T or T hours. We still give out candy, but the hot dogs in a bun (with ketchup, mustard & relish available) are a hit! And we bring out our water cooler and small cups and you wouldn’t believe how thirsty kids get. And it’s fun for us, and I feel like it’s a way to create community with our neighbors and strangers alike.
I feel ya. My parents worked the hotel/restaurant industry (a huge crush during The Holidays) and in a hospital. (Mom would work through Hanukkah and Christmas so the other nurses could take that time off.) As a 20-something, I work retail during that time. Even so, I can't imagine working UPS during that crush!
Not the same as being a nurse, fire-fighter, police but I worked at Starbucks for 12 years and my gawd!!!! Everyone and their grandmother comes into SB on Thanksgiving and Christmas. I used to get so angry about it! It is for this reason I do not and never will go shopping on Thanksgiving or Black Friday weekend- Can't those folks just have the friggin day off to be with their friends or family or both?
I distinct remember working at Starbucks on a Christmas Eve that happened to fall on a Monday. Our manager didn’t connect the dots and didn’t staff for it. I worked in a very busy downtown seattle store. We were demolished, lines out the door with only 3 people working and customers complaining to me that the cafe side looked gross. And when I tried to close the door at closing time, people begged me to stay open! As if I hadn’t spent 9 hours with no breaks! But “where is your Christmas spirit?!” Was shouted at me. I worked for a few more years at Starbucks and generally still have a good feeling, but I never worked close on a Christmas Eve again. And I will never EVER go into a store on a Christmas or thanksgiving or Labor Day again. People are absolute monsters.
It’s so interesting to me, I also worked at Starbucks for a while, and I always felt like, “if I had to work, the busier the better!” It made the shift go more quickly - plus, we were usually getting time-and-a-half for holidays back then. Certainly, if there was zero demand, and they would close on those days, that would be ideal, but failing that, busy was my preference! But I also worked at a really bananas store...
Yes. Busier better. However, there is a tipping point- an angle of repose where it all starts to slip out of control- but that wasn’t the point I was making. I wasn’t resentful of it being busy. It was more about how unawares both the company and the patrons were of the fact that we were working on a Holiday that was meant to be a break from work and so clearly was for those in the store who weren’t working.
I worked customer service call center for online flower retailer in college and you better believe that put me off Mothers Day and Valentines Day! (Mothers Day was by far the worst. More people have a mother than a valentine and those relationships are WAY more emotionally fraught!!)
Oh I bet you had some intense calls!
Valentine’s Day was 8 hours of being screamed at. Mother’s Day was 50% screaming and 50% sobbing - so much worse.
this is great!
I feel like the holiday spread is also “us”, as a society of consumers, trying to use holidays to make us feel something. If Christmas is magic, then let’s have MORE magic for longer. But, to your point, I think, making it longer and more complex - loaded with STUFF - robs the actual magic and tradition from it. By the time the holiday arrives, you’re spent - the magic is blown.
I have a 5 yo, and we are trying hard to keep the balance. We also have a small house. Part of the holiday joy is the tradition of bringing out the same things (decorations) year over year. If you change them/add to them dramatically each year, you dilute the affection and connection you create with the “old” things. I also tell my kid that the Elf of the Shelf isn’t interested in our family, because he’s a really good kid. 😂
That’s really good! I just refuse to do elf on the shelf, leprechaun nonsense. I told my son when he asked about something “you have two working parents…”
Thanks! It wasn’t original to me - I’m sure I saw it somewhere online first - but it works for us!
I mean...yeah, that's exactly why I celebrate months-long Christmas, because I'd rather have magic than depression. I lived a life where Christmas magic was contained to a small window in December, with a super hectic Christmas Eve and Christmas, and it was terrible for my depression and anxiety. Now it is spread out and I have something to look forward to for weeks before and after the 24th and 25th.
My daughter is 3 and when she was a baby she was gifted two Elf on the Shelf dolls by my cousin. I pulled them out for the first time last year and we play with them like regular toys and she loves them. We don't do it the "correct" way but who cares - she creates the adventures for them and I play along and that is our tradition, which is so much less stressful for me and is super fun for her.
Oh, that's a good one! 😂👍
I love that Elf explaination! So much better than mine - it’s fake and costs a lot of money that I’d rather use to buy you an actual Christmas present.
Reminds me of the 1940 “Mother Makes Christmas” picture book by Cornelia Meigs and illustrated by Lois Lenski, which must have been from my mother’s childhood. One woman wrests an amazing feast and a decorated room out of a rough New England storm. And her daughter has seen her destiny. When I recall my mother actually throwing Christmas ham across the kitchen c. 1986 in a sort of black-out stress rage, it all starts to make sense.
Lois Lenski!!! I loved her illustrations in Betsy-Tacy!
Strawberry Girl was my favorite:)
Another theory. The shrinking size of households AND the infrequency with which we spend time with extended family has left us with a huge reserve of ‘family time’ easily converted to buying decorations and over decorating more holidays...it’s the slow creep of capitalism replacing actual family interactions.
I think it’s also converting time people spent making things like celebratory foods, hand made costumes and decorations into buying stuff. Old fashion Christmas baking for instance is relatively cheap in money, but time consuming and fussy. Traditional Scandinavian American baking is “how many ways can we make butter, eggs, sugar, and flour into slightly different foods.” If you buy them, then you have so much more time to spend money on other things!
It’s totally this. As a full time attorney with three small kids, I was just telling my friends “I have no time, but I have money. So I can buy but I cannot make.” And so what would normally be a wonderful restful time of bonding and making things together (people used to decorate their trees with popcorn and candy canes and sugar cookies on strings!!), we “outsource” it all for the appearance of an authentic restful bonding period that we used to have generations ago and we call it “tradition.”
yes! Between work, commuting, kid extracurriculars, and life, I don't have a full day to make no-waste holiday decorations, but I sure as shit can order some while I eat at my desk or drop a kid at taekwondo or robotics or basketball.
Hahaha! My mother was Finnish - I FEEL that description of baking.
Yes to this- replacing face to face conversation with stuff. Well put
I wonder if this is a headlong crash of three American ideals into each other: the nuclear family, the Protestant Work Ethic, and FOMO. I say that, because it's - again - a slightly bewildering cultural phenomenon that I feel like I'm looking at from the outside, mostly for cultural reasons.
I grew up with sprawling holidays as a matter of family history - Ramadhan is an entire month. But you're not expected to arrange the celebration in a small unit - the nuclear family with the mother as project manager. The celebration may sprawl the month, but so too does it sprawl among people and places. There always - my entire life - felt like there was a work ethic to planning for, executing and then reviewing Christmas holiday gatherings, whether at school, work, or through hobby organizations. It was a annual event, budgeted for, with committees and commitments, planning and procedures. The FOMO thing may be a new internet-mediated-culture aspect of this, highly targeted to parents. As a couple without children, my hubby and I just never hear about these rapidly changing expectations for parents until months later when we chat with our friends who are parents. And then we're like... wha?
As an aside, I grew up with an intense outside pressure to participate in two holidays that were not a part of my family's cultural tradition: Christmas and Easter. We moved too often for my mom to be successfully pressured to be a PTA parent that brought the cookies and cakes and decorations and planned the parties for free for the school district. (This was the 1970s and 80s, btw.) So, we were able to kinda ignore it until the cultural pressures (for me to join the school choir, to bring Christmas presents for fellow students, to bring something to eat at the during-school-hours party, the endless questions of why my parents didn't "let me" celebrate Christmas) that my parents just gave in and did the minimum to participate in non-secular school festivities and allow me a stress-free winter at school.
They then picked up the secular, consumer aspects of Christmas and transferred it to New Years so my parents could avoid the cultural pressures they were getting to attend office holiday parties full of alcohol. It was easy at the time to just tell people we celebrated New Years with family and presents. I guess others thought it was some other kind of unfamiliar religious practice of ours?? The equivalent of the folks who celebrated Hanukkah instead of Christmas? (I felt such kinship with my Jewish classmates. I was never pressured to participate in their cultural traditions as if it was mine, but I was invited to join in and be present or be witness a few times. It's so hard to describe the difference, but latter felt joyous, welcoming and full of friendship. The former does not.)
So many thoughts about this one and not enough time to express it!
I identify with SO much of this. I am Jewish, and I always dread the Christmas season. I find it super off putting when people insist Christmas is secular, honestly. If you're not celebrating the birth of Christ, whose name is right there in the holiday, you're basically left with buying stuff. (Many people would say they're celebrating friends and family, but the focus culturally is far more on what you're BUYING them vs. celebrating being with them.) I understand many people who celebrate the holiday aren't religious, but that does not make Christmas a secular holiday.
I grew up in an area without many Jewish people, and in *public school* I was pressured into singing sacred music in choir, Christmas pageants, etc... I was always being treated like I was ridiculous if I did not participate in overtly religious celebrations. And I come from a liberal city. I can't imagine what non-Christians in other parts of the country face.
Now I face similar dilemmas when people give me Christmas presents because I do not want to be forced into Christmas gift giving, but there is the expectation of reciprocity. There are work secret Santas, white elephants, Christmas parties masquerading as holiday parties, and all kinds of not technically mandatory, but basically mandatory Christmas celebrations. It puts non-Christians in a position to have to either participate and spend a bunch of money and devote a bunch of time to a holiday they don't celebrate, OR they have to single themselves out and become thought of as a Scrooge.
For my Christian-adjacent stepkids, we have a Christmas tree, listen to Christmas music, watch Christmas movies, drive around and look at Christmas lights, and we open presents with family. I drew the line at Elf on the Shelf though, and we don't do any of the other stuff either. Their mom's side does a lot of that stuff, but my partner and I do not participate, even though the kids try to get us to do more. We do PLENTY. It already costs a lot of money and time to do what we do, and I'm so grateful my partner sees things like I do and sets those expectations for the kids so I don't have to be the bad guy.
I have absolutely nothing to base this on except a hunch, but I think we are only a year or two away from white, non-Hispanic Americans (of which I am one) co-opting Dia de los Muertos because “the decorations look fun” and it’s an opportunity for yet another holiday season with decor and food and activities.
oh this is absolutely already happening
Last week I had a (white, male, New Englander) colleague chuckle and tell me it's a good thing we scheduled our Breakfast fundraiser for Cinco de Mayo and not the day after. In New Hampshire. I just blinked at the screen a few times.
To my surprise, I don't hate it. I know a couple white folks who used to live in Texas and Mexico respectively and they earnestly participate because they lost people. It seems to help them. Our public library had an ofrenda set up for everyone in the community, too. I don't know. Someone tell me why I'm wrong!
Only speaking for myself here - and Dia de los Muertos is not
my culture - but I would draw a distinction between appreciating an opportunity to mourn those lost, and honoring them with an ofrenda; versus JUST appropriating the distinctive skulls + bright colors variation on “spooky season.” I would love for someone (s) Mexican/of Mexican heritage to share their thoughts!
Oh lol it hasn’t made it to my small midwestern city yet…but soon!
already all over my instagram and FB pages- it is def happening! It is so messed up the way so many people are racist or xenophobic until...
Very much already happening in California. And the co-option of those traditions into Halloween proper.
Target had a Dia de los Muertos campaign this year. Got a special email about it and they had an artist who was selling her decorations and activities.
As both a Jewish woman AND a retail worker, the Christmas season is exhausting. The retailer I work for famously doesn't put out decorations until after Thanksgiving (but minor signage is starting already) and a friend in a different state tells me he received COMPLAINTS yesterday, (Nov 5, to be exact) because the store isn't decorated. Who has that much time on their hands to actually complain to another human being that there is no Christmas tree or holiday music a few days after Halloween? I was in a home goods store the week of October 15 and they had Christmas music on the soundtrack already, which was weird to me. Good luck to retail workers everywhere!
As a somewhat religious Christian, super early Christmas feels well bonkers. We have a whole liturgical season (Advent) that leads up to Christmas, that doesn’t even start until 4 Sundays before Christmas. And Christmas itself lasts until Epiphany (Jan 6 or the Sunday after that). My family celebrates on that rhythm still, so I find the idea that you pack up Christmas Dec 26 because it’s “been around so long” odd.
I grew up Catholic and always celebrated from Advent to Epiphany but have now stretched Christmas into a whole season from November 3rd (after All Saints and All Souls Days) to Imbolc/Candlemas/Groundhog Day at the end of January/beginning of February. (I still go most hardcore from Black Friday to Epiphany.) The Catholic church I grew up it actually puts up their Christmas trees in the fall and decorates them with leaves through Thanksgiving, which I think is brilliant. I now am a Unitarian Universalist and find a lot of meaning in the Wheel of the Year and the blending of Wicca with Catholic and Christian traditions. There's a lot of spiritual meaning, but also, the Wheel of the Year grounds me into the seasons and celebrating life and I love sprawling the holidays throughout the year.
As someone who has struggled for the majority of my life with depression and anxiety, and now has chronic physical health problems, having sprawling, months-long holiday celebrations gives me joy to make it through the days and weeks. I am so excited that November is a fun mix of the end of fall with the beginnings of Christmas - last weekend we went to a local craft fair and bought Christmas gifts and got Christmas photos taken; this weekend I'm doing a fall 10K walk/run; next weekend singing in a fall choir concert and getting Santa photos; the following weekend Thanksgiving. Instead of beginning to sink into seasonal depression I am full of joy because of the sprawled holidays.
The pandemic has had the opposite effect on my (admittedly childless, now) family. We were so sad, Christmas 2020, that we couldn't gather. My parents were in their 70s, my young adult kids were far away, and we all thought it would be awful. We did miss each other, but we did not miss all the things we didn't do because we weren't traveling and gathering. Later, my mom and I both admitted that it was actually kind of nice. Restorative. Easy. Last year was the same thanks to the Delta variant surge, a winter storm, and our abundance of caution with my parents. This year, my daughter and her husband will be here, with just my husband and I. We're planning a day of reading, puzzling, playing board games, watching movies, and eating really good food. We're not exchanging gifts, having used the money I'd normally spend on them to fly her husband here from Europe. (They are in visa limbo/hell; long story.) Sometime after the holiday, my husband and I will make the drive to my parents, when the NW weather is cooperating and we've had some days away from his exposure to masses of high school students. It's not the kind of holiday I grew up loving--and which my mom and I spent many years missing, as our extended family died/scattered--but we're really looking forward to it. It feels almost subversive to celebrate like this (bonus), and empowering in this world where we feel increasingly powerless.
Another layer: if your work outside the home is in any way related to consumerism, the dreaded Q4 becomes an entire season of heightened stress and activity, trying to sell to the consumer during this holiday “season” that now starts Oct 1.
As a mom with 4 littles, I decided I didn’t want work to be more stressful during this already hectic season, which is why I shut down my product business.
I get this. I don't have kids, and I am now retired, but when I was working (at the head office of a major Canadian bank), October through January was, hands down, our busiest time of year, with year-end reporting, annual report, employee annual report, corporate social responsibility report, holiday messaging, spring annual meeting of shareholders to plan and prep for, etc. etc. I had to decide what was the bare minimum I needed to make the holidays feel special, and what I could cut out. For example, we always put up a Christmas tree but Christmas baking was put on the back burner for years. I always felt resentful, because there was so much I WANTED to be doing (and so much that I felt I was SUPPOSED to be doing), but I just could not keep up.
At this risk of being a little provocative here - This conversation about expanding holiday consumption/ performance always rubs me very much the wrong way. And so today I've been thinking about why and landed on this: We've gotten a lot better at, for example, not saying 'all people' when we mean 'all white people' or 'all upper-middle-class people' I think the reason this conversation rankles is because I think many people (AHP today maybe included) say "all people' when they mean "all Christian people" (or people who grew up in a Christian tradition/culture).
So I think my initial response on Twitter was identifying a smaller piece of this bigger whole thing that bothers me.
I personally know no Jews (who clearly identify as such) who do this over-the-top holiday stuff, even for holidays that they do celebrate like Halloween & Thanksgiving. I would imagine people from some other religious or cultural affiliations maybe feel the same way?
And maybe I'm totally wrong! I would love to hear other thoughts on this.
Love this provocation and I am very curious to hear others' thoughts — in the comments here and on Discord, I wonder how much of the embrace has to do with efforts to lean into "American" (read: Christian) assimilation, to perform "belonging," etc etc. I also wonder how much has to do with what you also said earlier today on Twitter re: absence of Santa/Easter Bunny/other "imaginary" creations in Jewish culture
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg wrote about her family's approach to Halloween which she considers to be entirely secular now. I can't give you the link, however. It's her "Life is a Sacred Text" site, I think.
You have to set boundaries. This is easier when you live in a diverse place, because not every family will be taking part in every single type of celebration. My classes had Jehovah’s Witnesses and Jewish kids and Muslim kids and kids of Korean descent, and they definitely were absent from some of Christian-focused celebrations. Even if you don’t have an excuse based on religious grounds, you have one based on family values and what you feel you can spend. Yes, peer pressure can be stiff, but once you start saying no, and explain why to your kids, they will understand even if they grumble.
So true. We choice-enroll our son into a Title I school because of their autism program. There is a noticeable difference in expectations of the families at that school (who have more racial, religious, and socioeconomic diversity) than the friends of our similarly white and socioeconomically-advantages friends on Facebook. Also, my autistic son often doesn’t feel the need to conform to expectations, and that’s been so freeing in terms of not getting comments like “but the elf on the shelf visits [classmate]!”
I’m so glad you have that option for him.
Hot take: I actually like the sprawl of Halloween and Christmas because it actually feels LESS stressful to me as a mom to a 3 year old to have everything spread out over the course of months rather than everything jammed into one weekend or weekday.
Oh god, as a kid we had to shove multiple stops to see all the relatives into one day for Halloween and Thanksgiving and two days for Christmas Eve and Christmas and it was so exhausting!!! Now we just spread it out throughout the month. I like having four different days of big Christmas celebrations because that means the days are more relaxed. My dad’s extended family does the Saturday before Christmas, we celebrate Christmas Eve as an immediate family and with our church family, Christmas Day brunch with my mom’s extended family, evening Christmas Day dinner with my in-laws, and the Saturday after Christmas with my mom and my brother’s family. It is so much more relaxed than having to try to make time for all of those people on the 24th and 25th!!! Yes, we have 2 stops on Christmas Day, but they’re only 10 minutes away from each other geographically so it’s not a big deal.
We also take advantage of doing a different activity tradition with a different set of relatives or friends over the course of two months for Fall/Halloween (Sept and Oct) and Christmas (Nov and Dec). So seeing the family and friends becomes the primary thing and the activity the secondary thing that has the bonus of creating a tradition with those people. For example, we spend Halloween with Mom/Grammy by going to Trick-or-Treat on Main Street the Saturday before, then with my in-laws at the local Trail-or-Treat the Sunday before, and then we spend Halloween with my daughter’s best friend and her family on Halloween night by trick-or-treating around the neighborhood. We spend Halloween with another close friend and her family by going to the corn maze together in early October (although I would be more than fine to push that up to September next year so that we don’t have an activity every weekend in October!) We get to celebrate fall with cousins at the local Fall Festival in September.
It only feels like extra pressure because capitalism makes full time workers only have eight days off a month, and we still need time to do domestic stuff and to rest and recover, so time is limited and precious. Also, because social media and general life social pressure makes us feel like we need to keep up with the Joneses.
So yeah, make fun of me for signing up to see Santa on Sunday Nov 20th, but then we don’t have to shove it into another December weekend day with something else.
Thank you for this. My husband and I are both children of divorce and there were years pre-pandemic when we were expected to have, I am not joking, three entire Thanksgiving meals in one day. We used the baby as an excuse to scale back in '19 and just haven't fully returned to the treadmill of it all since the pandemic.
But this year, we're trying to reconstitute something for Thanksgiving, probably hosting some of the grandparents at our house.
Halloween sprawl was feeling like it was going to overtake my life last month - a pumpkin stroll at school, trunk or treat on day, pumpkin stroll through town the next, costume parade at school, and then trick or treat? Yipes. We just opted out of some things, and I'm grateful my kid is too young to really understand her own options, or peer pressure or FOMO and I control her schedule.
BUT THEN! Halloween was the day RSV finally caught up to my kid, and we spent the post-school hours at the dr's and then the pharmacy, so the fact that she didn't get to go officially trick or treating has me a little bummed, but she definitely got to do Something in her costume.
Ugh, I do not miss being expected to have three entire holiday meals in a day (and being made to feel guilty because I was too stuffed to eat anything at the third house!) I'm just really grateful that as an adult my family is much more flexible about holidays not needing to happen on the exact calendar date. I enjoy them so much more and love that we still get to see everyone without feeling so rushed.
With my daughter being only 3, I also get to control her schedule which means I opted us out of things in order to keep us from running ragged. The cool thing is that while she loved the selected activities we did outside the house, she also loves reenacting them with her stuffies inside the house! They have been going to the carnival and the playground and on pony rides and trick-or-treating now for weeks!!
Oh, and one more thing: having multiple Halloweens means that kids can pick multiple costumes for multiple days if they’d like. My daughter got to be a scarecrow at the county fair and a witch at the Renaissance Festival and Peppa Pig for Halloween. Last year she was a cowgirl and a ladybug for Halloween.
Again, I can see how adults would turn this into a Joneses contest, but kids just love dressing up and the opportunities to be different things!!!
Also can we unpack the childhood magic thing? I’m just mulling over the relationship between this all right now. Childhood is so decidedly not magic what with school shootings and the number of kids affected by the opioid epidemic not to mention the pandemic and climate change and, and ….
I work in adolescent mental health and so have a front row seat to the crisis. Is it like “we will focus on bunnies and leprechauns and Santa because the rest is impossible to fix”?
Oh that’s a really interesting perspective! It’s easy as adults sometimes to just roll our eyes at the commercialization of these holidays, but how to seek out the balance of making something special for kids (and us, hopefully) in the midst of so much despair?
I’m definitely of two minds about this though. On the one hand I can see why it would happen. On the other I tend to think young people are wiser than we give them credit for and they’d like to have safe schools and homes and a habitable planet more than “holiday magic”. Wouldn’t they all be better served if we acknowledged that hard things are happening and will happen, but we’ll get through it together, and then like passed some gun laws? Rather than the elf getting into shenanigans.
I've been reading the fascinating and of-its-time book Last and First Men by Stapledon (1930). One of the interesting ideas in the book is that in America what is worshipped more than anything else is 'movement' - the need to be constantly producing and consuming and above all *moving*. This leads in his fantasy to a a future where everyone has an 'aeroplane', taking in flocks to the sky on holidays to literally worship motion, and doing so even when the consumption of fuel dooms them to freeze and starve. Pretty apt metaphor imo.
Hmm going to need to read this one.
Both increasing secularism and increasing Evangelical co-option makes this fascinating to me.
Like Advent is actually a fairly significant part of certain Christian traditions. During my childhood some people got Santa Advent Calendars, but Jesus ones where the doors opened to reveal little bit of manger scene or a little bit of a manger scene and a Bible verse leading up to Christmas were common.
And while, I 100% do not care about your beer Advent calendar. I do find it strange that people don’t know it’s actually Christian in origin and think it’s appropriate for public schools, government offices and secular workplaces. (And if you work in retail or something where a countdown to Christmas is important, I recommend just calling whatever prizes you are using to make it through the hellscape that is December “a countdown to Christmas”)
Lots of people celebrate secular Christmas, and that is fine. But when people start insisting to people who did not grow up marinating in Christian culture that it’s not a religious holiday so can totally take over public spaces that is weird.
Especially, when we have actual Christian Nationalists trying to run things. And part of that is trying to enforce mandatory Christian culture. So rather than transferring the bit of public land that a historic WWI memorial Peace Cross sits on to the VFW to keep up, we have the Supreme Court blathering about the cross not being a religious symbol so it’s totally cool on public land.
I do not care at all if you have decided Christianity is nonsense, but wear the cross a family member gave you. Or have an icon on display because it has meaning to you. Christians really can’t complain about appropriation.
The advent calendar bits in AHP’s essay made me chuckle because last year I bought my kids a Lego Avengers advent calendar (classic trying to overcompensate for COVID-limited Christmas via buying stuff) and my husband, raised very Catholic, was horrified: “They’re supposed to have Bible verses in them, not toys!”
This long and I didn’t mean to cut it there.
Basically, co-opt Christian holidays all you want for you and your family. You are entitled to. But beware of people using that to take other people’s rights away and enforce a veneer of mandatory Christianity.
Oh, the advent calendar! My Scandinavian grandmother would send me one every year - the family on that side is Lutheran. I'd learn when celebrations were supposed to begin, and why from a religious perspective. Those family religious traditions were meaningful to me. I see them now and intensely miss my grandmother. I don't miss anything about the secular celebrations we were pressured into in school.
And this why I say that no one should feel bad about doing whatever they want with Christian religious traditions.