A Theory of Sprawling Holidays

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Molding Pumpkin via Getty

This year, Halloween lasted forever. I heard this specifically from parents, who, when the actual night of Halloween arrived, seemed to dissolve into a puddle of corn syrup at the end of the night, particularly after fighting their kids to go to sleep ON A MONDAY and then wake up and somehow it’s only Tuesday?

In the week leading up to Halloween weekend, there were all sorts of small-scale Halloween activities and opportunities at school and PUMPKIN PATCHES and CIDER DONUTS and CORN MAZES. Then, for Halloween weekend itself, there were school parties and block parties and church parties and trunk-or-treat events and haunted houses and child parties and adult parties. For some families, the weekend is the time for one costume, and then a DIFFERENT costume comes out on Halloween day, when you engage in a sort of mad dash to get your kid fed so they don’t exclusively consume candy but out the door so that they don’t fall asleep while trick-or-treating but ALSO somehow prevent crashing and burning the rest of the night into a pile of smoldering discarded Bit-O-Honey’s.

I am being dramatic, but I’m also trying to convey how holidays — and not just Halloween — have come to feel like mini-marathons, spread out over several days, if not weeks, particularly for parents and children. Holidays are now “seasons” unto themselves, with performances and consumption habits and photos, the experience of which oscillates between joy and slightly numb obligation.

To be clear: I love a kid in a costume. I occasionally enjoy a costume myself and do not begrudge others who like them even more. I am not talking, not really, about the costumes, just like I’m not talking about the Thanksgiving meal or a brief display of fireworks at the Fourth of July or Seder dinner during Passover.

I’m talking about the spiraling extraneous shit: the Halloween Gingerbread House, the Thanksgiving cookie decorating set, the Easter “tree,” the advent calendar for months THAT ARE NOT ADVENT, the Christmas candy corn, the Mensch on the Bench, the Switch Witch, the Halloween “monster egg hunt,” the Halloween TREE, the Valentine’s String Lights, the VERY ELABORATE visits from leprechauns on St. Patrick’s Day (non-parents, this is a new and very real expectation), blow-up Home Depot decorations for every season, the elaborate Valentine’s Day exchanges, themed pajamas for every holiday, the list truly goes on and on.

Holidays can sprawl because of the way they fall on a calendar (see: this year’s Halloween placement) — and during Covid, I also think many of us fully embraced the sprawl, simply because there were so few ways to mark the sludge of time, save buy things that made quotidian life feel festive. But the slope, it’s slippery and paved with Halloween “villages” and Independence Day peeps.

Culture Study reader Leah Samberg told me that she sees this general phenomenon as part of a larger “Christian-ification” of non-Christian holidays, as the traditions most commonly associated with Christmas and Easter (advent calendars, Christmas villages, Christmas trees, egg hunts) get mapped onto otherwise secular holidays (or onto other religions’ holidays, if we’re being real here). I see this, but I also think it’s the intense commodification of those two holidays that’s spread, with the (often muted) Christian connotations in tow.

As the events themselves became commodified, the core of them — the Jesus Was Born, Jesus Was Resurrected — have been progressively hollowed. I’d wager most people who didn’t grow up regular churchgoers have little understanding of what advent is, other than an opportunity to open a small door every day to a new mini-gift. In this way, commodification and consumption becomes the primary way that Christmas is expressed, is experienced. The primary affect is one of near-constant purchasing, unboxing, arranging — a vigilant doing — as opposed to periods of observation, contemplation, devotion, being.

I’m not trying to “put the Christ back into Christmas” here — just highlighting the very American practice of filling opportunities for stillness, or doing nothing but being (with others, in church, in prayer) with activity. And again, I’m not just talking about “making a meal for us to be together.” Christmas as we now understand it — as a cultural, child-centered phenomenon — was a 19th century invention, in part popularized by American author Washington Irving’s incredibly popular collection of Christmas essays, set in a warm and cozy English manor where all the rich people and peasants co-mingle peacefully and “ancient” traditions abound. (Irving was responsible for the popularization of St. Nicolas and gift-giving, which gradually morphed into the Santa-ification of today).

The holiday gradually filled with elaborate, labor-intensive practices, almost exclusively performed by women (Christmas card writing, gift procurement and wrapping, Christmas tree trimming, Christmas cookie making and exchanging, Christmas breakfast and dinner planning and cooking and cleaning) that have now been normalized as the scaffolding of a “perfect” Christmas experience. If you were poor, you did what you could (or, in the spirit of Dickens, hoped for the beneficence of the rich, or public spectacle endowed by the rich). If you were rich, most of the labor would still have been performed by servants.

But after World War II, the labor expectations for Christmas Creation spread throughout the newly expanding middle class the same way washing machines did — and became yet another way for that generation of women to evidence their skill at “home making.” And as middle-class women began to move into the workplace in the decades to come, the expectation for Christmas creation — like so many other components of home making — remained constant, even as hours away from that home rose significantly.

Performing Christmas became a way to maintain middle-class domestic cohesion — to broadcast to your immediate and extended family and the whole block that we’ve got this on lock. (So many of the current attributes of Christmas reinforce the middle-class American family ideal: the primary signifiers [the tree, the visible lights] are “best” on display in the single-family dwelling; you can only get a (sizeable) tree with a car and someone capable of heaving it around. The “magic” of Christmas depends on the presence of children to experience it alongside; to spend Christmas alone is framed as some sort of unspeakable sadness).

You can see how Christmas Creation took over the month of December — starting with the weekend after Thanksgiving, with that initial push for massive consumption, then gaining speed and intensity, trying its hardest to absorb Hanukkah, all the way up until Christmas Day itself, which is often experienced as a sort of explosion followed by stupor. There are so many things to do, so many gifts to buy, so many family photo shoots to sort through and then pick the right photo to upload to Shutterfly. Some of it rules! Some of it does not. But the truth is that there’s not a lot of obvious ways for Christmas to continue expanding. Hence: the dog advent calendar I just saw this morning at Trader Joe’s.

So where does all that anxiety over homemaking and magic-childhood-making and evidence that we’ve got this on lock go? Other holidays. Each one becomes an opportunity to do more. For holidays with meaning, that entails hollowing out the actual holiday itself and replacing it with things to buy and do to render it sufficiently “performable.” For holidays with little meaningful resonance save caricature (see: St. Patrick’s Day) that means expanding the performances and norms associated with the holiday, particularly for kids.

Of course, many people opt out of these homemaking performances — particularly straight men, people without kids, or people who no longer have young kids in their lives. But when your kid’s best friend’s mom hypes him up for LEPRECHAUN MAGIC, and you see those moms at your kid’s preschool posting about this year’s elaborate LEPRECHAUN MAGIC PLANS, I can see how it would be hard to tell your kid: leprechauns just don’t like you, no magic for you, or some other coded version of compulsory magic-making is labor disproportionately foisted on women and I’d rather just hang out with you or even maybe just hang out by myself.

In this way, leprechaun magic becomes the norm for the next generation. And when something becomes a norm, deviating from it — even when it exhausts you, even when you think it’s ridiculous, even when you know it has no bearing on your actual love or care for your child — can feel a lot like being a bad parent.

And so: The Mom Does It, and each extended holiday season is flattened into an expensive, time-consuming to-do list, a stream of Amazon boxes, a constant unpacking and packing-up. Some of it can feel fun, or at the very least diversionary — but I think it’s too much, too diffuse, to really feel special, at least not special in the way we wish it would feel. All my favorite holiday memories are, in truth, the jankiest ones: my favorite Christmas fixtures are the weird felted Skinny Santa that someone gave our family decades ago and the Norwegian Tomte my Grandma made. I loved just driving around in the car on some random weekend night, looking at lights as a family. My brother and I made and continue to make very ugly Christmas cookies that resist grammification; it’s really just an excuse to listen to Mannheim Steamroller together and recreate the dance routine we did as kids. On Christmas Day, we go to the movies. Tradition and the things that your family remembers usually involves very little buying shit.

Holidays are not accidental. Historically, they have served as a means to keep those doing the most labor from revolting: a brief release, revelry, and rest, just often enough to stead off rebellion. The irony about these newly expanded holidays is that most of them aren’t actually even days off, and many people are still required (or encouraged) to work them. We’ve evacuated the holiday of the rest and respite that it’s supposed to provide, and the reaction to that loss isn’t to create less accompanying work, but more of it. It’s a counter-intuitive reaction, but most coping mechanisms are — particularly when encouraged by contemporary capitalism, which both creates, widens, and exploits our feelings of lack. No one thinks they’re not creating a sufficiently magical holiday experience until someone else’s elaborate “harvest” deck display whispers that they are.

I’m not against holidays, or costumes, or Candy Corn, or traditions, or anything that you do in your family that actually feels meaningful, like you’re choosing your damn holiday choice, every year. But the sprawling, expensive, and exhausting holiday impulse — it is so rarely the celebration we crave. No one person, no one parent, no one spectacle can prop up the failing American ideal, or make us feel like we’ve got our shit on lock when so many forces outside of our control are ensuring that it our shit is very, very much not on lock: the rent’s too high, the childcare’s too tenuous, the future feels fucked. We could grapple with that, and decide on a different way forward.

Or we can follow the lead of every store I’ve been in over the last week, and tuck the Halloween decorations away and into the trash. It’s already November 6th, after all. Didn’t you know? It’s Christmas. ●

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