I spend more money on Halloween than I do on Christmas. And every year I realize it more and more … I’m spending money on Halloween to share it all with a bunch of strangers and their children rather than on my own family and friends.
I already give lots to my family throughout the year, I don’t need a special holiday to justify those relationships. I used to spend hundreds, even thousands of dollars on decorations, suppers, gifts and doing things for family in or around Christmas and none of it ever made a damned difference. I still love my family but it wasn’t because of Christmas … it was because they are my family. I don’t do any of that any more and you know? I still have the same level of appreciation for my family and they do the same for me … without all the BS of Christmas fanfare.
But on Halloween, I’m giving more to random strangers I don’t even know or will probably never meet again during the year … and all just for the sake of being nice to them.
So now I find that Halloween is a more giving and fun holiday than Christmas. It’s made me realize just how wholesome Halloween is compared to the commercialized hellhole that Christmas has become.
Screw Christmas.
Instead, on that date, celebrate someone real and much more worthy of consideration
Ironically, a bit of a religious whacko
I’m willing to let that slide for almost anyone born pre-enlightment. As long as they didn’t get super murdery over it.
He was by all accounts an insufferable asshole, petty, vindictive, and completely aware how fucking stupid most people are esp compared to him. And also a Biblical conspiracy theorist who was much more interested in the exact dimensions of the Old Temple than in developing Calculus.
Also he arguably created the miraculous technological world in which we live better lives than he could have dreamed. Our debt to him can never be fully paid. His name will rightly outlive us.
You kind of understand where he was coming from.And don’t even get us started on Pythagoras!
Gives a whole new gravity to this time of year
That joke deserves an equal and opposite reaction.
Halloween rules. It doesn’t pretend to be about anything but fun. You dig hardcore horror? Its got you. You into pumpkin and candy corn aesthetic? Check. Sexy anything? You got it. Pink skeletons with discoball eyes? Fam, this is the holiday for you. There is no wrong way to celebrate. There’s no gate keeping here.
Also, Halloween you get to spend with friends, people you choose. Much more relaxing than family.
Edit: commented on wrong comment
christmas was halloween before christianity separated the two
Bingo! … that is why Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol as a series of ghosts that visit Scrooge … it was a tradition of story telling of retelling scary ghost stories during the longest day of the year … the moment in the year known in pagan religion as the moment in the year when the dark forces are at their strongest and highest … the winter solstice, the longest night of the year when the darkness is at its strongest … but also a moment of hope, as the light has started to return and the days grow longer.
this is some form of cultural tending to fires of knowledge in eachother right here
never forgetting where things came from
All my friends and I have felt this way for a few years now. My wife and I are planning to spend $200 total on Christmas and that’s including the dinner we’ll likely host for friends.
Halloween is fun and my wife and I get into it but it’s also becoming a very commercialized thing around us. Everyone buying the massive 12 ft skeletons and trying to outdo each other with the yard and giving out bigger and bigger treats. Someone was handing out full Doritos bags this year, not the single serve, we’re talking family size.
I think my wife and I are going to try getting into Mari Lwyd next year instead.
I will never be impressed by purchased decorations that obviously don’t take any effort to set up
“wow, the same inflatable from home depot as the house around the corner! amazing”
ofc, I did fuck all the last couple years, so I can’t complain. I’m hoping to change that next year
also giving out family size bags of chip (let’s be real though, they’re basically only as big as regular full size from 10 years ago despite costing twice as much) is nuts. I ain’t got that money
I do spend a lot of money on Halloween … more than Christmas … but it also means I don’t go crazy either. Almost all the money I spend just goes to candies, chocolates and chips … the Halloween serving size … I’m not going to start going further than that. I also don’t spend much on decorations, I put up enough to make people and kids know I’m celebrating Halloween … and I decorate five or six real pumpkins. That’s it … I put on a sound system with scary music and Halloween songs and serve candy all night long.
I would also say that Halloween is the last remaining holiday that encourages and expects self-expression and artistic abilities. Making costumes, coming up with unique prop ideas, carving pumpkins, etc.
Also, the act of trick or treating and joining halloween parties encourages socialization far, far more than other holidays which seem to just expect you to have dinner with people you don’t necessarily want to be around. The act of sending kids to knock on neighbor’s doors does more for our communities and our shared future than all the inflatable santa’s in the world.
I like both
Fuck yeah, I’ll raise a glass of spider-venom-laced-pumpkin-juice to that!
Lunar New Year has joined the chat.
Wait actually nvm, the parents give $100 in a 红包 to your aunt’s kid, then your aunt gives you $100 in a 红包, then you both say thanks.
Then you go home and your parents tell you to give it to them to “safeguard” the money for you; “帮你保管” my mom said, “for college”.
So result:
Money exchanged, money has been moved, but zero actual value has been transfered. They just have a different, fungible, $100.
Gifts: None, except temporarily in possession of $100
But you know, “your mom gave birth to you, you need to 感恩, to be thankful” xD
“世上只有妈妈好” lolol
Thank a lot mom, I love the um… gestures to the air in front of me gift you gave me, very lovely mom 🤗
(okay I kinda exaggerated, I did sometimes get gifts, but not often. it was so rare lol. often its nothing I really wanted… 🥺)
Ugh… Asian Families… It is what it is… I wasn’t even supposed to be born, so I should probably be more thankful to my parents that I even survived past One Child Policy.
The money my wife got was “for college”, then “for marriage”, then “for the grandkids”, and now “for the grandkids’ college”. Life truly is a flat circle.
I don’t particularly like christmas but I downvoted you for the culture war. Get fucked, Halloween-country. :p
Do you think you can scare us?
Fear is our egg-nog!
Halloween is my fav holiday. It’s just so whimsical. I wish that trick or treating was still as popular here as when I was a kid. If I can ever afford a house, I hope to be in a neighborhood that has trick or treaters
100% it is.
And you don’t have to deal with your awful family feeling entitled to your time and money.
You’re either really cheap at christmas, or you have the greatest Halloween spread ever
I just don’t value Christmas much any more … I do give out gifts but at this point, I just hand out money to the people I want to gift to because I never know what people want, especially kids and teens … and when you give them money, they know exactly what they want to do with it.
Halloween however, I do spend a lot more on. And I don’t spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on big ugly props and blow up things or store bought crap … I spend quite a bit of money building up a supply of candies, chocolates and chips. I take the month leading up to the holiday and steadily buy a little bit at a time. Then by Halloween, I’ll hand out handfuls of stuff to every kid that comes to the door. This year I had 100 kids and they each got a bunch of stuff. Then I have a tradition at the end of the night of waiting as long as possible and then giving away whatever I have left to the last kid. This year, it was a couple of teen boys who looked to be about 15/16, I filled one guys bag by dumping my box of chocolates into his sack … the other kid was just messing around and didn’t even have a bag, so I gave him a supply of old pillow cases I had ready, handed him one and told him to open it up as I dumped the rest of my chocolates and chips … those were two of the happiest guys I got that night … the bonus was that I didn’t end up with all that candy that would have made me sick anyway.
Ha! So you have the greatest Halloween spread ever! Nice work!
Or they’re broke like the rest of us and it’s a short scale
Halloween is nihilist, anything-goes.
Christmas is meant to be much tamer, not a feast, but a conmemoration.
It’s a shame how Christmas has become a commercialised hellhole due to secularism instead of being what it originally was: a Christian holiday. It’s always more fulfilling to get back to the roots of it, many churches hold special events for it.
Halloween is similar. Unfortunately, Protestants barely observe the religious aspect.
