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.

    • IninewCrow@lemmy.caOP
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      7 hours ago

      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.

      • bluemoon@piefed.social
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        4 hours ago

        this is some form of cultural tending to fires of knowledge in eachother right here

        never forgetting where things came from