Can someone put together a universal theory for why Tumblr loves Halloween to a fault but hates Christmas
Tumblr skews young, Halloween spent with friends, Christmas with family.
Tumblr skews young, more users want to fuck monsters than want to fuck Santa.
I have an actual theory behind this, but I won’t be able to articulate it well until I read Bakhtin and maybe some of the medieval peasant-culture anthro stuff, so I’ve been putting it off. The short of it though is: Halloween is Mardi Gras, while the “holiday season” is Lent. Christmas however is not Easter; the closest equivalent to Easter is the day after Christmas, when you are no longer exposed to Christmas shit and you can maybe get a day off if you work retail.
Over the course of my lifetime Halloween has transmuted very noticeably into a kind of peasant carnival. I think this is because its colonization by commercial forces focused entirely on trick-or-treating, and its religious associations are nonexistent here, so above trick-or-treating age it was left completely to “the folk” to do what they wanted with.
Basically there’s two distinct elements to modern Halloween: the first is that it acts out, and thereby creates, a sense of mastery over and comfort amidst the anxieties of life – death, and monsters, and horror, and so forth. These are several steps removed from the actual sources of people’s fears, but they represent them. The posture of being at home, amongst family, in the company of death and horror is a way of grappling with the senseless horror of life.
The second aspect is that Halloween flouts the pieties of conventional society, whereas Christmas embodies them. Therefore, Christmas is the anti-Halloween. Since it’s America, bland corporate pleasantries and hyperconsumerism are themselves pieties, and as more and more of the population shifts into the service sector, the number of people who experience those things like an imposition from on high increases. The reason everyone starts celebrating Halloween as early as possible, yet dreads when the same thing happens at Christmas, is because Christmas is a “high” holiday that embodies the norms and culture of the upper-middle-class. Halloween is a vulgar party whereas Christmas is a
genteel
sermon; the commercialization of Christmas only changes the church and God.
My theory: it’s the creator vs curator debate.
Halloween involves making things and performing weirdness publicly, Christmas involves paying money to hope you guessed correctly about someone else’s preferences.
also we’re all broke and at least in my clusterfuck of a family there’s a competitive aspect to gift giving that provokes low-grade anxiety until it’s over.
I think this is probably true, but I think it’s true to some extent because Halloween has not been extensively “monetized” outside of trick-or-treating, despite the efforts of the Sexy and/or Hilarious Party Costume industry. If we put a hedge fund in charge of Halloween I have no doubt they’d make buying everything premade mandatory and restructure the whole thing around spending money to quell low-grade social anxiety, just like with everything else.
I can’t totally agree with this latter part because: Christmas decorations.
I feel like I should expand but I’m really not sure what to say. Christmas decorations can easily be as individualistic, hokey, home-made, or weird as… Well, there’s less license than Halloween but a heck of a lot more than for any other American holiday.
Not o butt in and derail, but there’s undeniably an aspect of- as discoursedrome mentions- the total absence of widespread religious associations with Halloween.
That means for the atheists and pagans and jews and muslims and buddhists and lapsed christians and anyone for whom Christmas is a two month long stress exercise where the goal is to avoid a fist fight with every single fucker who keeps assuming you’re Christian no matter how annoying it is, and worse, may have the fucking balls to try to convert you if you point it out?
Halloween is actually a celebration. Where Christmas is a solid 6-8 weeks of hearing people who literally dominate every aspect of your society talk about how they need to be even more dominant, and how everyone else should be grateful for that domination because at least it’s “fun.”
So, there’s just, immediately, a much larger population of people for whom Halloween is accessible, compared to Christmas.
Tumblr skews American, and in America, Halloween is an acceptable inversion festival. That’s not the right word for it, but people interested in anthropology/history/theology can give you the right one. I remember that @copperbadge actually wrote about it here, but there’s a word for it that I’ve forgotten. Anyway, these festivals are deliberately anti-normative and provide an acceptable way for the public to skew/invert social mores, which is thought to be useful (source needed) as a sort of release valve for stressed-out societies, who spend the rest of the year picking over their inhibitions and repressions. Halloween just happens to be the way that the Puritan-influenced United States manages to invert its traditions. But in other cultures, Christmas actually has inversion rituals!
There are actually a lot of inversion traditions associated with Midwinter in the UK - wassailing, the Feast of Fools, the concept of mumming, probably even Morris Dancers, mystery plays, and figures like the Lord of Misrule - all of which have an inverted character.
There is a lot of weird, freaky, morbid pagan stuff like the Mari Lwyd, the undead Welsh horse who goes trick-or-treating at Christmas, demanding alcohol with a menacing song, and you have to try to send her away in song form; when you run out of reasons to keep her out, you must invite her in and give her alcohol. The Grey Mare is played by a real horse’s skull and a sheet draped over a man, with a stick that allows him to snap the jaws menacingly at people, terrifying the shit out of children. This has a very American-Halloween feel, but she’s very strongly a Christmas-season character, who comes during the darkest nights of Midwinter with her festive red and green ribbons.
Figure 1. WHO IS SHE
“Mumming” is a weird relict of medieval?pagan? tradition in the UK and it’s what “The Mummer’s Dance” by Loreena McKennitt is about. People dress up. It often involves the Christmas Mystery Play, which involves St George being killed by a dragon; he is then revived by The Doctor, and kills the dragon. This is considered to be extremely Traditional and Christmassy. Here is The Doctor, clearly taking some inspiration from the modern Doctor Who, who probably took some inspiration from him, in turn; The Doctor is about to revive St George with a magic potion in a spray bottle. Santa is also there, and people with significant hats. We are all encouraged to believe that this is extremely Christian and normal.
Figure 2. This is the true meaning of Christmas, if you didn’t know.
In continental Europe, which I know less about, there are even more Midwinter/Christmas inversions, like the Krampus and the Yuletide-Lads (chaotic-neutral Icelandic elves).
Figure 4. “no guideposts to sense-making are set forth by adults” is a very millennial experience
So why does Tumblr like Halloween so much?
Possibly because it’s a culture strongly influenced by Americans, and further by Americans whose coming-of-age was influenced by 9/11, whose experience of Halloween was one of the rare times that the powerless felt powerful, when strict social hierarchy was relaxed, when different roles and attitudes could be safely explored, and the cultural themes of death/doom/fear were inverted into something that was enjoyable.
