Another post over a Twitter argument. Not really an argument. More like a philosophical question. Someone asked whether I liked Halloween better than Christmas. Answer: absolutely.

You might balk at this answer. “Are you saying that candy is better than presents?” No. I’m saying that neither of those things should be the primary factor we use to judge a holiday. If I had it my way, the gifts we get at Christmas would be better spread out over the course of the year for multiple holidays, anniversaries, and birthdays etc. No need to have them all at once. What are you getting your kids for the Fourth of July this year?

And let me point out that the gifts really are important for that demographic: kids. Adults can buy their own gifts. Kids generally need a special occasion to get toys. Why is Christmas the designated special occasion and not Easter? Who knows! Seems random to me. For most adults, Christmas isn’t that special for the same reason summer isn’t that special. It’s really just another day where we eat special food, have parties, sing songs, etc.

My point is that once you get outside the presents for kids, which can be redistributed to other special occasions, Christmas is actually a fairly tyrannical holiday. Every year, retailers start using Christmas as a selling point earlier and earlier. Normally, it’s October, but in some places, I’ve even started seeing Christmas creep into September and even August. At first, it’s just silly, but then in November, we really start getting serious. It makes the other holidays around it, Thanksgiving and New Years, practically disappear, and God help you if you’ve got a birthday in December (you’ve probably never gotten a real birthday gift in your life).

Not only does Christmas show up rudely early, it leaves unfashionably late. If you leave pumpkins out too long, they rot, so most people know to trash them quickly. Even complex decorations come down after Halloween rather quickly. Maybe hanging corpses, headstones, and spider-webs detract more from property value than trees and lights. Christmas decorations stay up until February. They’re like a party guest that doesn’t leave.

Maybe that’s because the majority of us only put them up under compulsion in the first place. Christmas Trees and lights are labor intensive to put up and most of us don’t know why we bother other than the fact that everyone else is doing it. Don’t decorate your house on Christmas, people accuse you of being Scrooge. When was the last time someone made you feel awkward for not decorating your house for Halloween?

I guess that’s the heart of my thesis: Christmas is coercive. Halloween is libertarian. Through a series of mutually enforced cultural norms concerning gift giving, decorations, carols, and movies, Christmas forces you to go along with the mantra that it’s the most wonderful time of year. Halloween doesn’t mind if you ignore it completely. Dress up, don’t dress up. Jack Skellington doesn’t care.

The movies associated with each respective holiday say a lot. Halloween movies are…horror movies, which Americans enjoy watching all year round. There are a few movies that are centered on the holiday itself but not many. Halloween gives us an excuse to watch movies we like watching anyway. Christmas movies on the other hand are all pretty much about Christmas and most of us wouldn’t watch one outside of the months of November through January. The exceptions might be “Christmas” movies like Die Hard or the Nightmare Before Christmas which aren’t really Christmas movies. Traditional Christmas movies like It’s a Wonderful Life and A Miracle on 34th Street function like Soviet propaganda films, force feeding us a message about how wonderful Christmas is. There are a few such movies that qualify as watchable, most notably Home Alone and Elf. Funny thing is that Christmas even ruins those movies. Now you can only watch Home Alone during Christmas time so you may as well do it now! Nobody will ever ask you why you are watching The Exorcist in March.

Christmas is so coercive that it controls other holidays. We’ve already talked about Thanksgiving and New Years. What’s really frightening is Hannukah. Hannukah didn’t become the Jewish equivalent of Christmas until the Christmas season became so overtly totalitarian that Jewish people in America felt the need to pump Hannukah up in order to compete. It was actually a minor holiday. Every year we get sermons from pastors and priests about how we shouldn’t let Christmas take Advent away. I say this sermon is unrealistic in this day and age and should be replaced with “Don’t let Christmas take away All Saints Day.” All Saints Day and its better-known companion, Halloween, don’t intrude at all, on the other hand. They make so little nuisance that every year in Halloween’s shadow we have an angry argument over Columbus Day, a trifling holiday if ever there was one, and Jack Skellington just smiles at us while we make fools of ourselves.

I know you all are bringing up the gifts again. If parents didn’t give kids gifts on Christmas, they wouldn’t give them gifts ever we are told. I think that if we hadn’t specifically designated Christmas as gift day that parents would space their gifts out more. Concentrating all gift giving in one day has had some really negative social consequences. It begins in grade school where it becomes clear that Santa favors the rich kids in town not the best behaved. If gift giving was spread out more evenly, income inequality might not be so obvious. Thus, Christmas becomes a dick measuring contests to see who can get the best haul. This continues itself into adulthood with Christmas decoration contests resulting in lighting displays so bright they are a danger to low flying aircraft. Christmas becomes an opportunity for Americans to one-up each other with Veblen goods. (Real economic term). It has gotten to the point where we expect to see people to stampede each other the Friday after Thanksgiving every year. I don’t even go outside on Black Friday. Forget the movie series. Go to the mall the day after Thanksgiving and witness the real Purge.

While Christmas drowns in commercialism Halloween actually fulfills the role of an actual holy day: getting people to behave better. On Halloween people send their children out, often unattended, to the homes of their neighbors asking for candy, and the neighbors usually respond by providing the candy without any kind of compulsion, governmental or not, or even complaint. It’s an act of faith. People dress up and go to parties with their friends and neighbors and have a good time. Sure, teenagers used to make trouble, but Hell Night’s been relegated to myth at this point.

When I was growing up, Christians would denounce Halloween as the devil’s day, but it’s probably Satan’s least favorite day of the year. People go around dressed up as evil incarnate in an obvious attempt to make fun of him, the most prideful being in existence. They watch a bunch of movies reminding people that evil is real, a fact he’d rather they forget. Children go around getting candy for free from people too happy to give it to them. No commercialism. No shallow competition. No one trying to politicize the whole thing by claiming some kind of “war on Halloween.” Just people leaving their house and conversing with friendly neighbors. If I were Lucifer, I’d find the whole thing rather depressing.

I propose we take this moment as an opportunity to fix Christmas. Now, we can’t make Christmas just like Halloween. Jack Skellington proved that for us. What we need to do is somehow fix what has turned Christmas into this miserable black hole of commercialism and politicization. Once again, I think it all has to do with the gifts. Now, kids need gifts, and there is some truth to the idea that parents wouldn’t buy their kids gifts unless the Christmas spirit forced them to. That’s why the way we fix Christmas is by making multiple Christmases: namely four of them. You see, Christmas used to be one of four dates on the western calendar that divided the year into four quarters and each had its own holiday: Feast of the Annunciation, the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, Michaelmas, and Christmas. These holidays got kicked to the curb as industrialization required a more standardized calendar, but with manufacturing now increasingly being done by robots, who’s to say we couldn’t do with another three days off? Hell, we could even give back Presidents Day and Columbus Day, and any other holidays we don’t care about. We don’t even have to make them particularly religious. The Nativity went by Midsommer sometimes, and the Annunciation was called Ladyday. That might offend a predominantly Protestant culture, but we can negotiate on the names.

More importantly, think of what this would do. By telling parents to give presents four days a year, they would no longer feel pressure to overdo it on Christmas, and the competition of who got the better haul during recess would end. Decorations would be simpler and easier to put up and remove. The business cycle would even out. Toy stores wouldn’t need to wait until November to reach the black. None of these holidays would be important enough on their own to overpower other holidays. Thanksgiving and New Years would actually mean something again other than being placeholders for Christmas. No one would ever tell someone born on September 13 that he should just wait a few weeks for Michaelmas. Turning Christmas into “Present Day” has ruined Christmas by making it too important. We need to spread some of that importance out to other holidays, and a funny thing will happen. We might actually start to enjoy Christmas again.

As it stands, I’m enjoying some last-minute Halloween fun before bracing myself for the grind of the upcoming Christmas season. Happy Halloween, and if a man in a red suit shows up at exactly midnight tonight pointing at his watch, tell him to buzz off.