As American as Spooky Fun and Branded Merch
In a recent post, I praised the NFL for being woke by inviting a Spanish-language Puerto Rican rapper to headline the Super Bowl LX halftime show, and lambasted the MAGA reactionaries for throwing a hissy fit over it. I called out MAGA for wanting to bring the United States back to the white supremacy of what they think of as the “good old days” – Hispanics need not apply for the role of American.
In my argument, I brought up academic Michael Lind’s idea of how the United States has gone through periodic redefinitions of itself as a nation. As part of that evolution, Lind recognized the emergence of four cultural mainstays of our national identity: baseball, American football, Thanksgiving, and our unique way of celebrating Christmas.
It is because of football’s iconic status as an American pastime that it is so meaningful that the NFL made its gesture of inclusivity to Hispanic-Americans. By the same logic, this is why the gesture upsets MAGA partisans. Personally, I commend the NFL, and that’s all I have to say about that in this post.
Next, I wanted to speculate on what new cultural elements might now be considered essentially American, given the progress of recent decades.
In the realm of professional sports, surely we would have to add basketball. It is more popular than baseball now. It was propelled to international fame by the wild success of the Chicago Bulls in the 1990s, with star former player Michael Jordan now a multi-billionaire. And college basketball’s “March madness” NCAA tournament has been a staple of office betting pools for at least twenty years that I can remember.
I would also add the blockbuster film franchises that have emanated from Hollywood, and which also have global reach. They may be repetitive, each movie following the same formula as the last one, but that’s kind of how audiences want them. They are like a fast food version of entertainment – you know what you are going to get. Based on box office alone, the really big franchises are Star Wars and Marvel, and it was smart of Disney to buy them up, as the luster has come off of its original fairy-tale inspired brand.
For a new essentially American holiday, I nominate Halloween.
Halloween, or All Hallows Eve, is one of those Christianized pagan holidays dating back to the middle ages. It is connected with the Celtic festival of Samhain, which marks the end of the harvest season, and came to the United States via Irish and Scottish immigrants in the 19th century.
By the early 20th century, familiar Halloween traditions such as parties, costumes, and trick-or-treating had developed in the U.S. But it was really with the post-WWII baby boom and the rise of suburbia that you started to see the annual spectacle of hordes of kids in costumes swarming neighborhoods on Halloween night.
Each postwar generation has had their own special experience of this holiday. Boomers were there at the inception of the modern mode of celebration. They were trick-or-treating in an era when the suburbs were safe enough for kids to wander unsupervised, and to prank middle-class homes without risking being shot to death. From their childhood comes the sentimental imagery of Linus from Peanuts waiting for the Great Pumpkin.
The Boomer childhood marks the rise of a Halloween costume industry, in parallel with the rise of television, as children wanted to dress as their favorite TV characters. Costumes then, and going into the era of my generation’s childhood (that would be Gen X), were cheaply made, and featured plastic masks and vinyl coveralls you wore over your clothes. They seem chintzy, even bizarre, in retrospect, but how could any Gen Xer like me look back at images of those days and not feel the twinge of nostalgia? Here’s a fantastic archive of these photos: Vintage Halloween Pictures of Generation X.
Those old costume companies have all gone out of business, replaced by the monolithic Spirit Halloween, whose retail outlets spring up perennially all around the nation each October. Meanwhile, the amount of pop culture intellectual property available as merchandise has exploded, with new icons being created each year (anyone dressing as a KPop Demon Hunter?). The industry is huge, set to reach new spending records this year.
In the lifetime of Millennials, Halloween has grown as a celebration for adults only, with new expectations. As the movie Mean Girls put it, it’s the one night a year when a girl can dress like a complete slut and not be judged for it. Any costume, apparently, can be made sexy with a little effort.
A more wholesome trend is the family Halloween costume cosplay, reflecting society’s growing family focus over the decades since Millennials started being born. In photos shared each year on social media, the young post-Millennial generation is enfolded into the holiday tradition with joy and creative spirit.
Halloween is so big now, I don’t see how it doesn’t have equal stature with Thanksgiving and Christmas. These three holidays together, coming at the end of every year, are part of the ineluctable rhythm of American life. Yeah, they’re highly commercialized. The way we celebrate them is unsophisticated, often to the point of complete kitsch.
That just makes them all the more American.
