I hate January. I don’t think that needs any further explanation; everyone across the whole world is thinking the exact same thing right now.
What better way to celebrate my utter hatred of January than to dwell upon how great the holidays were? Well, that’s exactly what I’m going to do.
I’ve now experienced my first full holiday season in the USA, and noticed some big differences compared with what I’m used to. For one thing, in Britain we would never dream of calling the end of the year the holiday season, but over in America I’ve noticed it being said approximately a million times. Anyway, here follows a highly biased list of how specific holidays and celebrations compare between Britain and America!
Halloween
This is what I arbitrarily think of as the beginning of the holiday season. According to Wikipedia, the America holiday season should actually be considered as beginning with Thanksgiving, but this doesn’t seem right at all to me. On the one hand, it makes sense to not include Halloween, as no one tends to take the day off of work, but on the other, lots of people celebrate it, and it gets lots of hype. Also, in Britain at least, the Christmas adverts get churned out on TV the day after Halloween, so to me it makes sense to include it as the beginning. Disclaimer done!
In the UK:
In my childhood, I went trick or treating like most kids. This was usually something that lasted about an hour at most, and was only to the houses on our street.
My parents aren’t into Halloween, and are also super thrifty, so my brother and I had to wear the same outfit from the age of 6, until whenever it was we stopped trick or treating (probably an embarrassingly old age.) My costume was a demon/devil mask and red gown; my brother’s was a skull mask with a white gown. My Mum sewed together the gowns.
Nowadays, people say that Halloween is a bigger industry in Britain than ever before, kids even change their costumes every year, however, I personally have noticed very little of this. In my final years in my parents’ house, barely one set of trick or treaters would come around, and from leaving for University until leaving for America, I didn’t get one trick or treater visit any place I lived. I’ve been to some Halloween parties, but I can’t imagine that a box of plastic spiders and fake cobwebs make that much of a profit. How the industry is growing is a mystery to me.
In the US:
Wow. They like to do Halloween big. That may sound like stating the obvious, but I wasn’t prepared for just how big it is. In Britain, the few Halloween decorations that appear are put up, at most, two days before Halloween. In America whole streets are caked in Halloween decorations by the end of the first weekend of October. And the decorations just keep on coming.
For my wife and I, we spent last Halloween in my wife’s Aunt and Uncles’ vacant house in suburban New Jersey. It was the day before we moved into our new apartment in New York, so we were excited. We were miles away from anyone we knew, meaning a party or social event was out of the question, so instead we stayed in and watched Curb Your Enthusiasm all night. Spooky.
We saw lots of kids on the street, trick or treating. One thing that they were doing that I’ve never seen before is that their parents were convoying them from one location to another in a series of cars. It’s one thing to not watch scary films and all that when you’re an adult, but for children to go out on Halloween, with all sense of fear being diffused, by being driven along by your parents at a safe speed, struck me as depressing.
Very few of the trick or treating children came to our house, probably because they knew that for the past few years it had been vacant; and was therefore kind of scary. I can also imagine, that to the parents, the obvious signs of life coming from a house they knew to have been mostly empty for years, could only mean that hobos had taken over the building. With that in consideration, I decided to give the children that did come trick or treating extra sweets for their bravery and for blatantly disobeying their parents. You earned it!
https://www.instagram.com/p/9hS0dGGFG1/?taken-by=whobalaya
Thanksgiving
In the UK:
Doesn’t exist. It’s just any old Thursday.
In my old town there is a local business awards night that the company I work for often gets awards for, so the night usually had a celebration feel to it. Also, when my wife was living with me in Britain, she used to make a green bean casserole that she always makes for Thanksgiving. I was always stuffed from the awards night food, but oh well.
In the US:
It’s basically like Christmas without the Christmas. By that I mean that it’s a day off doing nothing and eating a big dinner, but not presents, or TV or anything like that.
It does have an inescapably Christmassy feel to it though. This may have been a little to do with the fact that we spent time putting up Christmas decorations and listening to Christmas music at my wife’s sister’s house. For me, it was enjoyable because it was my first chance to see a part of America that wasn’t New York or suburban New Jersey. My wife’s family all live in Atlanta, which is about a thousand miles down south (that’s not even being figurative).
Also, unlike Christmas, which has lots of little moments that make it up, Thanksgiving is centered entirely around the dinner. A lot of my wife’s family are vegetarians, so I was able to stuff myself on the food and not feel too bad about it afterwards. Win Win.
Christmas
https://www.instagram.com/p/_gB3-HGFOf/?taken-by=whobalaya
In the UK:
Everyone grumbles about how “Christmas gets earlier every year”, to the point that there is literally no way to talk about it without invoking a pile of clichés. I tend to notice Christmas things appearing in shops, pubs, streets and restaurants at some point in early September, which is highly irritating. Worst is the way that it slowly creeps in, starting with small displays and decorations that you catch in the corner of your eye; which slowly grow larger, and then engulf places in early November. By Christmas, you’re sick of the decorations.
As for Christmas week itself, in the past I’ve always spent it at home, with my family, like most other people. On Christmas Day, there’s barely a car on the street, everything except for hospitals and churches shut down, and everyone watches TV and eats constantly. The same for Boxing day, except some people flock to shops to try to find sales.
In the US:
Christmas in New York is something that has been done to death in the media. Everyone has an image of it, however, I found it to be very different from the picture painted in films like Elf and Home Alone 2.
It’s, in a way, much more low key. For one thing, the Christmas decorations on the most part don’t come out until after Thanksgiving. I came back to New York on the Sunday after Thanksgiving on a 16 hour coach ride, and saw the transformation as we went back into Manhattan. There were certainly a fair few decorations, but nothing more excessive than you might find in London at the same time of year.
My wife’s shown me some pictures of some places where she went Christmas shopping, and they look more like the decked out fare I had been imagining. I guess that my lack of Christmas decoration sightings might be because I restricted my Christmas shopping to Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and Brooklyn’s Atlantic Center, but still, I had the impression that any shopping district would go overboard.
Christmas Day itself was very different, compared to what I’m used to. I don’t know about most of the country, but in New York there is no way near the level of shut down that is experienced in Britain. Many of the subways were still running, as were the trains out and into the city. I know this, because my wife and I went out to New Jersey by train to meet her Aunt and Uncle for Christmas dinner. On the way to the subway, I noticed that most of the shops along the street were open and trading. Strange. Also, when we arrived in midtown Manhattan to switch to the train, it was full of people. Why weren’t they home?
We took the train to New Jersey, and had a big buffet dinner in a restaurant. It was great. No cooking and all the food you could want. I know that some people eat Christmas dinners in restaurants in Britain, but for me it was completely new. We spent three hours in the restaurant in the end, and had all different kinds of roasts, sides and desserts. Three hours well spent!
Later that evening, my wife and I went to her friend’s Christmas party in Brooklyn. Her friend is Australian, and pretty much all of the other guests were too. It was also about 21 degrees Celsius outside, so it felt like Christmas in my imagination of Australia. Only in America can you have two different continent’s Christmases in the space of one day.
New Year
In the UK:
The entire world tends to treat New Years as a big irritating party. Sometimes, I take part in this and go out and drink till I can’t remember the decade, let alone year. Sometimes, I do the same but by staying in.
In the US:
We didn’t go out to Times Square, or Coney Island, or anywhere. Our New Year’s Eve was more like a traditional Christmas Day. We sat in and watched TV. Makes for a boring end to both 2015 and this blog post, but there you go.
Let’s all get through January and make 2016 not 2015!