After last week’s presidential election, something unusual started happening in my neighborhood: On a walk to a wine bar on November 11, I saw stoops lined with pine garlands next to skeletons and spider webs, relics from Halloween a mere week and a half prior. Someone had set up two life-size nutcrackers on their front porch; someone else’s brownstone windows offered a peep into their living room, where a fully lit Christmas tree was already aglow inside.
But according to people all over the country, it wasn’t just my neighborhood. The early start to the most festive season seemed to be a reaction to — what else — the results of the election, which plunged many Americans into an uncanny mood they haven’t experienced since the last time Donald Trump was elected in 2016. Or, as Massachusetts social worker Dylana Becker put it: “Holiday lights because my daughter may have no fucking rights.”
Becker started putting up Christmas decor on November 6th. Rachael Kay Albers, a marketing professional in Chicago, told me she “just bought a 10-foot tree, not even on sale,“ with the philosophy, “Fuck it, it’s time for twinkles.” Rachel Lewis, a social media manager in North Carolina, erected an inflatable penguin on her roof that same week. “Our neighbor said, ‘Isn’t it early?’ And we said ‘No, it’s not.’”
Much like how interest in elaborate skincare routines exploded in the wake of Trump’s 2016 election, Americans seem to be diverting their anxieties into holiday cheer, if only by sheer force. It’s not exactly a mystery as to why: In uncertain times, we seek escape and comfort, and nothing occupies a cozier or more nostalgic place in the American imagination than Christmas. Couple that with a late Thanksgiving, and people are seeing little point in waiting for the turkey to be done to put up their trees.
For some, Christmas came even before the polls closed. Mia Moran, a children’s book editor in Queens, said she went shopping for Christmas pillows at Target in early November. “This year it just feels like we needed something,” she tells me. “[Christmas] is a good outlet, and also a neutral sense of pure joy. It’s not charged in any way.”
It’s ironic, considering the decades-long right-wing mania about the supposed “war on Christmas” by the media establishment. This year, for the first time in recent memory, perhaps it’s the left who’s more fervently embracing the holiday. “When the polls close in your state, you are officially allowed to begin playing Christmas music,” tweeted First Amendment lawyer Adam Steinbaugh on the evening of the election. After it became clear Trump was winning, comedian Mike Drucker posted, “I’m listening to Christmas music starting tomorrow cuz fuck this shit.”
According to the Wall Street Journal, forcing holiday spirit is a “healthy response” to election stress, one that “beats sitting there saying, ‘Oh my god, this is an existential threat to the world and I’m going to enter a doom and gloom loop,’” explained Kevin Smith, a political science professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
It’s also entirely possible that it isn’t just the election that’s caused this year’s bout of “Christmas creep,” a term that’s been discussed and debated since the 1980s. The phenomenon itself has existed far longer, however: Early Christmas sales (and complaints about them) can be traced back to the Victorian era. It’s typical for customers to be annoyed by businesses using far-off holidays as marketing tools. What’s less common is for Americans to seemingly all agree, individually, that the time for twinkle lights is now.
This year, per Axios, retail experts say that holiday deals are starting early partly because of the fact that there are five fewer days between Black Friday and Christmas this year, and partly because of election uncertainty. Lowe’s, for instance, launched its holiday decor line in July, a month earlier than the year before, while Amazon moved its Prime Day up to early October.
America’s favorite coping mechanism has always been buying stuff, and if Christmas spending is any indication, we’ve been getting steadily more anxious for years. The National Retail Federation expects the typical consumer will spend $902 on Christmas gifts and decor, up $25 from last year, reports Business Insider. Prophecy Market Insights projects that the Christmas decoration industry will nearly double in the next decade, from $8.45 billion in 2024 to $13 billion in 2034.
Charles Scheland, a professional modern dancer in Manhattan, says that in addition to putting up his tree, string lights, and nutcracker statue, he’s also already started pulling his favorite Christmas music to teach in his dance classes. He says that part of that is due to the shock and disappointment of what began as a galvanizing Democratic campaign. “I really think that the joy of the Harris campaign and the optimism of that movement got people excited, and to have that so deafening crushed, people just want to get some of that joy,” he says.
There’s also another reason for the skip from Halloween to Christmas, he posits. “Thanksgiving is a tricky holiday because it is often celebrated with extended family, and sometimes we don’t agree with our extended family. So rather than getting into the trickier holiday, we’re just jumping ahead to the next.”
In the years since 2020, holidays, and to an even greater extent, seasons, have become celebrations not just IRL in the form of decor and activities, but online. People on TikTok and Instagram began to document their “winter arcs,” their “Meg Ryan falls,” and their hot girl summers as a way of marking the passage of time when it seemed like the only way to feel alive was watching someone else’s life through a screen. As I’ve argued before, dividing one’s life into seasons and leaning heavily into seasonal aesthetics is a way of romanticizing your life while also dissociating from it, a potentially useful tool when it feels like nothing makes sense.
I’m not immune, either. After my unexpectedly festive neighborhood walk, two wines deep, I decided that I absolutely needed to make a reservation at one of those bars in Manhattan where they deck it out with festive decor for the month of December. In most respects, these are miserable establishments — the kind of bars that are overpriced and crowded to the point of sweltering, places marketed with the promise of quaintness and communal cheer but mostly exist as traps for tourists to take photos in. But in that moment, being surrounded by a million twinkling wreaths and giant red bows and exhausted holiday shoppers from New Jersey sounded like not the worst place to be. In fact, I could think of much worse things: a decaying democracy, or a man investigated for sex crimes being installed as attorney general, for instance. So screw it, it’s Christmas now. May we all find merriment where we can.
