Why Thanksgiving Decor Can’t Compete With Christmas Creep and Spooky Season

I grew up with an approach to Thanksgiving decor that, I’d say, is a cross between "berry sprigs we just picked up on a hike, put them in a jar would you" and "afterthought." I assumed this was the general spirit across the land, but recently, especially online this year, I’ve seen a distinct new Thanksgiving decorating theme, which is in a word: Christmas!

For years, retailers have started selling Christmas merchandise as early as October 1, a practice that causes a continual hullabaloo and has its own nickname: "Christmas creep". Culturally more significant, last year, Mariah Carey declared "It’s time!" on November 1, in a video that showed an immediate transfer between spooky season and festive blitz, as she sings "All I Want for Christmas Is You." (This year, Carey’s first Yuletide post came on October 2 when she announced dates for her Merry Christmas One and All! tour with a caption that read: "Yes, the actual defrosting has begun!")

Because it’s my saintly instinct to cherish the ignored and to bolster the underdog, my attention turns to Thanksgiving. Besides the vaguely autumnal-themed leftovers from Halloween, where are the specific Thanksgiving felted knickknacks and the turkey baubles and the cranberry-themed mugs? I don’t know. Do I want them? Not at all. I’m notably wary of anything overtly themed. But seeing the burgeoning all-out excess in decorating for both Halloween and Christmas, I don’t know why Thanksgiving got the shabby end of the seasonal tablecloth.

"Thanksgiving often falls into the shadows," interior designer Brenda Danso tells me. Her clients, who turn to her for seasonal decorating needs, barely mention Thanksgiving. Now, people who work with interior decorators for holiday decor are an exciting subset of the population—and certainly not representative—but they exemplify a group that’s both invested in festivity and resourced to do whatever they want. And they don’t seem to want Thanksgiving.

According to data shared with me from Google Trends—measuring since 2004—searches for Halloween decor are about only a third of the searches for Christmas decor; Thanksgiving searches are less than a tenth of searches for Christmas decor. As of writing, on TikTok, the views for #christmasdecor are at 6.9 billion; the views for #halloweendecor are a little more than half that, at a modest 3.9 billion; and the views for #thanksgivingdecor remain the merest (35.7 million). This could be, partially at least, explained because Thanksgiving is not an international holiday. But neither is Halloween, really.

By calendar placement alone, Thanksgiving is unquestionably the middle child of the fall-winter holiday set. The first child (Halloween) receives a big initial rush of energy and a whole set of funny new clothes and an outlandish toy (Home Depot’s 12-foot tall skeleton). The third and last holiday child of the year (Christmas for many) is incredibly precious, cherished, imbued with childlike wonder forever. Thanksgiving—stoic, steady in the center, intent on providing—demands nothing fussy.

I’ve developed theories. My first theory involves the official mascot-slash-edible arrangement of the day: the preposterous turkey. I believe it’s the very goofiness of this bird that deters too many likenesses. We already have crafted turkey cutouts made from traced hands of first-graders, and maybe some Spode crockery, adorned with the regal turkey and extraneous hunting motifs. I’ve heard of some enormous inflatable turkeys puttering about on lawns in the suburbs; I myself was tempted to purchase a sequin turkey sculpture that looked prepared for a Mardi Gras float, so weird it was. But no matter how you style it, it’s hard to be reminded that this primary icon of Thanksgiving has been roasting in the oven for several hours. Decor featuring this creature seems cruel to say the least. The goods are rare and the goods are morbid.

"Every year, Thanksgiving has slowly just gotten smaller, because there’s been more demand for Halloween," Christy Pedersen, communications manager and part of the decor installation team at Holiday Warehouse—a 30,000-square-foot emporium of holiday decorations just north of Dallas—tells me. "Ten years ago, we had much more. Now, it’s under one percent of our buy."

Pedersen presumes it’s because Thanksgiving is a more private function. Even if the dinner group feels large, it’s usually just the closest family and friends who come over. "It sounds bad, but Halloween and Christmas are more showy holidays," says Pedersen. "Thanksgiving is when you close your doors and have a few people over and too much pie."

And, unlike its bookending peers, Thanksgiving is not highly refined to be delightful for kids. Halloween and Christmas are incredibly magical holidays, and the decor goes a long way to create this celebratory world. "You’ve got two holidays full of fantasy and candy and presents and so on," says Penne Restad, history lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin and author of Christmas in America: A History, "and Thanksgiving is the one where we sit down and we’re reflective."

Reflective to a point, she says, because Thanksgiving has an especially problematic history and associated mythology. And while Christmas has a wide cast of characters and stories—from the Wise Men to the Reindeer—available for decorative references, the Thanksgiving story reflects some brutal American hagiography. To literalize the characters from the story of the pilgrims and the Indigenous people breaking bread would be to revisit colonial whitewashing. "There’s no fantasy or potential for stories," says Restad. If Thanksgiving celebrants consider its origins too hard, "we get to the part with Native Americans, and then, oops, went too far, don’t know how to think about that."

When I explained the premise of this article—a curiosity about why Thanksgiving has languished alongside the decor boom of Christmas and Halloween—some people, who I know to be very invested in other seasonal decor, got a hushed tone. You’re not encouraging people to decorate for Thanksgiving, are you? they asked in some way. When I promised I wasn’t, they each sighed thank god. The others have gotten so big, something has to go. Interior designer Courtney Smith summarized the sentiment: "Thanksgiving’s sandwiched in the middle. I don’t know that we could decorate for it, logistically. I would be dead tired."

Because, for once and for now, we didn’t go over the top with something. While we collectively sell out Home Depot’s viral Halloween skeletons, and we tie ribbons on every available perch for our Christmas schema, for Thanksgiving, we can grab some pretty branches from a hike, call it a day, and be grateful for that.

Top illustration by Tara Jacoby

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