this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2023
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I think Christmas has become the poster child for this unending cycle of "event seasons" that is pushed by retailers. New Year's celebrations and sales give way to Presidents Day sales and Valentine's (if you really love her you'll spend $10K on a real blood diamond) then it's Easter (gotta buy cute new clothes for the kids to celebrate the rising of the Christian lich god) then Mother's Day, Memorial Day, Pride Month, Fourth of July, Back to School, Labor Day, Halloween, say hi and bye to Thanksgiving bc Christmas ads featuring white people buying ridiculous shit for their spouses take precedence.
Macy's played a significant role in popularizing Christmas consumerism through events like the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and their holiday displays. The first parade was in 1924.
It was around that time Christmas was portrayed as a shopping holiday. It was such a successful marketing campaign that the rest of the holidays were sure to follow.
Meh, at least the blood diamond thing is dying fast and hard. Young people don't give two shits about real diamonds, and neither do some of us old farts.
Hell, my finance and I are both 52 and the question of "real" diamonds never even came into play. We just got on Etsy and picked a couple of dope rings that we loved, ~$500 for both.
Disclaimer: Her ring appears to have real diamonds, but they're tiny. For $260, for that ring, I'd say the price of diamonds has tanked.
You forgot Super Bowl Sunday which takes place between New Years and Valentine's Day and is a heavy consumption day.
To be fair, people like holidays and it's tradition far older than capitalism, the calendar in most of catholic and orthodox countries (and afaik the nonchristian religions aren't that much different in that) since medieval up to even XX century in some places was literally counted not by months and days, but from holiday to holiday and there was dozens of them, so every few days except maybe the great fast there was this or that holiday. Capitalism just took the heavily cutted protestant version and concentrated the holidays even further, but the actual celebrations are just few days (we can't give proles too much free days, we need the labour to steal!) so that the preparations got extended beyond the wildest expectations.