When Special Is No Longer Special
There is something very sobering about 6 January, when the Christmas decorations come down. All of a sudden, your comfortable home, which I’m assuming you have more or less decorated and arranged to your taste, looks like a paragon of Shaker austerity. Mantelpieces, shelves, windowsills, and other elements of indoor architect are revealed in all their wooden or metal nudity; gone is the soft glow from the fairy lights on the Christmas tree.
The effect is only momentary, and it’s rather a relief to see your surroundings resume their familiar contours and colours – which is precisely the point of the decorations in the first place. They are meant to elevate the Christmas period [or the high days of whichever your faith is] into something special, to signal a period of relaxation of daily routines in favour of celebration, gaiety and indulgence.
Yet now the decs go up at the slightest pretext: Easter, Valentine’s Day, and last but very much not least, Halloween. According to a retail analyst at Mintel, Halloween is ‘no longer just about costumes and sweets; it’s about a full season of engagement, gifting [puke] and themed activities’. Aaaaarrrrrggggghhhh! The online wholesaler Faire has reported a 500% increase in the number of Halloween products available in the last four years, up from 425 in 2021 to 2,632 in 2025 – these products being chiefly trees, wreaths and ornaments.
Perhaps the scariest thing about Halloween is when you look at the figures for the waste it generates:
- 7 million costumes binned in the UK every year – the equivalent of 2,000 tonnes of single-use plastic
- 18,000 tonnes of pumpkins sent to landfill every year – each pumpkin takes 20 years to decompose (this would be only 8 to 12 weeks in garden compost for a pumpkin whose contents had been eaten)
- Electronic Halloween items are contributing more and more to the growing waste stream of 61.3 million tonnes of waste electronic and electrical equipment.
Retailers are determined to foist on us a never-ending stream of seasonal tat from Valentine’s Day to Christmas via Mother’s Day, Easter, Father’s Day,[1] End of Term with cards and knick-knacks for teachers, Summer Fun, Back to School, Halloween and Thanksgiving (they’re doing their best).
The fallout is everywhere: one house down the road from us has a wreath of pink plastic flowers on the door whose spring-like appearance is at odds with the defunct sunflowers in the front garden.
There’s a word for all this: ‘tawdry’, which the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines as ‘bright, showy and designed to look attractive, but which is actually cheap [and] poorly made.’ It’s derived from St Audrey’s lace, a cheap necktie or ribbon traditionally sold at Ely Fair. By the 17th century ‘tawdry lace’ had come to stand for anything flashy but of poor quality.
And don’t get me started on fairy lights! They used to be a sure-fire indicator of a party or celebration of some find, but now they’re up all over the place, all of the time.
All of which means that the times of the year that are special now outnumber the times of the year that are not. Which means that what was special has now become ordinary, and we are the poorer for that.
[1] Why no Mayday merch: red flags, hammer and sickles to hang on the door, and Communist Manifesto balloons?