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.caOPEnglish
      1·
      17 hours ago

      I just don’t value Christmas much any more … I do give out gifts but at this point, I just hand out money to the people I want to gift to because I never know what people want, especially kids and teens … and when you give them money, they know exactly what they want to do with it.

      Halloween however, I do spend a lot more on. And I don’t spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on big ugly props and blow up things or store bought crap … I spend quite a bit of money building up a supply of candies, chocolates and chips. I take the month leading up to the holiday and steadily buy a little bit at a time. Then by Halloween, I’ll hand out handfuls of stuff to every kid that comes to the door. This year I had 100 kids and they each got a bunch of stuff. Then I have a tradition at the end of the night of waiting as long as possible and then giving away whatever I have left to the last kid. This year, it was a couple of teen boys who looked to be about 15/16, I filled one guys bag by dumping my box of chocolates into his sack … the other kid was just messing around and didn’t even have a bag, so I gave him a supply of old pillow cases I had ready, handed him one and told him to open it up as I dumped the rest of my chocolates and chips … those were two of the happiest guys I got that night … the bonus was that I didn’t end up with all that candy that would have made me sick anyway.