What's Really Behind The (Way too) Early Start of the Holiday Season?
It’s hard to believe, but it’s happening. Reds and greens are starting to infiltrate our color palette just a little bit more, candles dot neighborhood windows, parents are dusting off their elves for some shelves, cars are wrapped in big red bows, companies are rolling out new seasonal flavors, leaving pumpkin behind because, after all, pumpkin is sooo August.
It’s November 5.
On Facebook this weekend an article started dotting my newsfeed that stated the act of putting up holiday decorations makes us happier. It was backed by science. Well, duh. We are built to anticipate fun events; it’s called synthesized happiness, and it can play tricks on us. It can often make us think experiences will be better or worse than they actually are. The experience of looking forward to something exciting can help us deal with tough times. Just ask anyone who has clicked “submit payment” for a flight to Florida as you’re hunkered down during a January snow storm.
Personally, I don’t need the immediate rush of early November gingerbread lattes or holiday music on the radio or cheesy movies on Lifetime. There’s a time and place for that, and it lives in December between Thanksgiving and Christmas (bah humbug!).
This desire for more holiday cheer has bled into other parts of the year. Last week, everyone in the world posted pictures of themselves, their children, and their dogs in Halloween costumes. Not just on Halloween, no no, that wouldn’t be enough. The weekend before, the day before, and the weekend after are now all fair game for Halloween costumes and trick-or-treating. Schools have parades and kids have multiple costumes. Towns have different nights for trick-or-treating, allowing people to spend more than one night collecting candy.
At this point, you could go from October 1 to January 1 celebrating Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas (or Hanukkah), and the New Year without a single day off. That’s three months, which is all followed by the long, cold, dark months of January and February, when everyone takes an inventory of their lives and resolves to eat better, exercise more, sleep longer, and tweet less.
After working through my “back in my day we celebrated Christmas for six minutes, uphill both ways!” I wondered why this is all happening. One easy answer is that the corporations inundate us with marketing that makes us want to be festive and show it off (all those “likes” on IG for that epic costume or light show or tree-cutting adventure is quite the motivator). Another answer is that it’s a ton of fun, and in this day and age the more fun the better. Aren’t we all just immune to those small doses of dopamine anyways, now that we carry those little slot-machines in our pocket 24/7? Why should we have to wait? Why can’t I go from trick-or-treating to Christmas-list-making in the blink of a night? After all, the rest of the year sucks and we just had daylight savings end on Sunday, so the evenings drag on forever. It’s dark, it’s cold, so what’s wrong with passing the next eight weeks watching Love Actually on repeat (this might be a tradition I could get behind…)?
Honestly, there’s nothing wrong with it. It you want to do it, swell. Knock yourself out.
But I’d posit that a big reason for all this festiveness is the ease at which it distracts us from everything else that’s going on in our world. It pokes at our nostalgia nerve and allows parents to make their kids happy, which in turn makes parents happy. It provides parents with a big carrot at the end of the stick. Imagine Halloween ruling a kids’ behavior for a whole month (you can’t go trick-or-treating if…), and then suddenly Hanukkah or Christmas is coming (you better watch out…).
This all seems like the perfect foil for any sort of mindfulness. We’re constantly looking ahead; we need to grab the holidays by the horns and shake every ounce out of it because on the actual day we fear it will fall flat of what we hoped. We might get in a political debate or our siblings might be bickering or we might have to be reminded of a lost loved one. That’s not what the holidays are about (or is that exactly what the holidays are about?). The holidays are now about the build up to the holidays. The build up has grown longer and longer and more and more expensive.
I am writing this on the first Tuesday of November, 2019. In one year’s time, millions will be voting for the next president. There are going to be a lot of moments where we want to run and hide during 2020. We will be faced with nasty, negative rhetoric that will continue to seep into the culture. We’ll most likely have to deal with violence and debates around guns and immigration and hate (how badly are you jonesing for a holiday cookie right now?). That’s going to make people want to escape more than ever, our entire country will be experiencing the Fight or Flight phenomenon at once.
Yes, I’ve managed to mix holidays and the upcoming election (and the current tension in the country). I do think they are connected: dress up as something else for a night, surround yourself with festive lights and decorations, listen to holiday songs, and eat holiday treats.
It’s all about escape to a different time and different place. If that’s what people need to survive and maintain sanity, I guess we’ve got bigger problems than blow up snowmen on the lawn, reindeer on the roof, and Mariah Carey wanting us for Christmas.