Calendar of Consumption

How many times have you walked into your local corner store only to discover, via some product display, that Mother’s Day is just around the corner? Have you ever complained about how the Christmas decorations appeared earlier on the shelves than they should? How about that half-price Halloween candy on November first? The humble seasonal aisle or holiday endcap of your nearest grocery store—the one that so easily jolts you from the present moment into this colorful space of the calendar—is so much more than a small slice of seasonal fantasy for children or holiday enthusiasts. It is the embodiment of produced and commodified time, “seasons” made material and available “just-in-time.” It’s in this oddly mundane yet heterotopic timescape that we are offered a window into the system of cyclical hyperproduction and consumption that we call holidays.¹

There is of course a long history of associating the holidays with production and capital. Every year analysts poll, predict, and record the holiday season’s capacity to stimulate the economy and herald high spending as a symptom of a strong national economy. What is largely unaccounted for and under considered, however, are the environmental and human costs of these annual overabundances. Like cities themselves, contemporary holidays are “built out of natural resources through socially mediated natural processes.”² In pre-industrial times, the human processes that underlay these annual events were simpler, rooted in work done closely with the land and recognitions of cyclical flows of abundance, death, and renewed vitality. In time, holistic practices and observances associated with this work were manipulated into tools of assimilation, control, and extraction. Now these festivals and rites, as well as their celebrants, have become intensely disassociated from the landscapes that produce them and, as such, threaten to destroy the spaces and processes that begat them.³

Holidays also have a long and storied history of control. Many contemporary American holidays are rooted in ancient, socio-ecological ritual: Valentine’s Day is believed to have sprung from the Roman festival of Lupercalia, and Easter is said to have its origins in the Feast of Ēostre, the Germanic goddess of the dawn. Both originate from springtime festivals recognizing life and birth around the vernal equinox that were absorbed into the Roman Catholic calendar.⁴ At the midpoint between the autumnal equinox and hibernal solstice once marked by Samhain—the druid end-of-summer festival that welcomed the dead to partake in the harvest—we now have Halloween. We know it to be derived etymologically from “All Hallows’ Eve,” the day before All Souls Day, a 7th century Christian holiday put in place to snuff out preexisting paganism at the unruly edges of the erstwhile Roman Empire. Such acts of erasure through amalgamation and thus dilution, known as syncretism, were common practice by the expansionist medieval Church.⁵

As a critique of cyclical consumerism and cultural colonialism through an ecological-temporal and sociospatial lens, the scope of this analysis is limited to the processes and externalities of Western, and specifically American, holiday practices. This is not to imply that similar delineations of space through time, migration, and material culture do not occur in other cultural and geographical contexts. On the contrary, urbanizations resulting from ritualized holiday practice exist around the world: the annual Hajj, for example, which has formed modern-day Mecca while the Kumbh Mela draws over 100 million worshippers to inhabit the banks of the Yumuna and Ganges Rivers for nearly two months.⁶ The limitation in scope here stems from two principal interests: first, the Western, and particularly American, context’s early focus on individualistic consumption, a condition that has proven both corrosive in its processes and viral in its spread; and second, the geospatially-determined climatic specificity of the temperate zone out of which these holidays come, grounding them in an ecological-temporal consciousness at their very origin. Of interest too, the metabolic urbanism of these commercialized holiday practices is not so conspicuous in scale as the Kumbh Mela or the Hajj. In this case, the urban is understood not agglomeratively at the scale of the city but instead, more ephemerally, as a process blanketed across territories through the multiplicity of the small. The spatialization of the American holiday calendar is, in short, a question of urbanism through commercial logistics, “seasonal” supply meeting archaic and even mythical demands.

With most of these deep-rooted holiday’s comes a unique object, a now manufactured good that was once seasonally a part of a specific natural environment. Such objects totemically signify that the passage of time and construct the crossing of a temporospatial threshold. Many such objects are echoes of the paraphernalia of festivals past—like the Thanksgiving turkey, the feast-sized pheasant of the Americas—while others are directly, even indexically, related to geographically specific time such as the evergreen Christmas tree, Yuletide proof of the returning spring.⁷ Given the dual nature of these objects as both commodities and signifiers of the season, they are produced at physical and temporal scale that is out of step with their own natures. They are what we might call material monocultures: merely one part produced in profusion to represent the whole—in this case, a whole stretch of the annual cycle. And like any monoculture, they are inherently exploitative, engineered exclusions bent on hyper-production. As James Scott points out in his parable of German scientific forestry, such monocrops are fragile simplifications that flatten otherwise robust systems and, for it, are prone to sickness, failure, and collapse.⁸

Roses | Rosa grandiflora

Few things seem to say, “I love you” quite like a rose. Truly, communication is the origin story of the rose as a material monoculture of Valentine’s Day. Though the rose has long been associated with love (the Greeks associated it with Aphrodite), the rose as a means of communicating love was popularly introduced to 19th century Europe through Charlotte de Latour’s book Le langage des fleurs. This highly influential publication outlined floriography, an Ottoman practice (known as sélam) which used flowers as a form of communication.⁹ St. Valentine’s Day, having already existed since the 3rd century, had taken on romantic overtones over the preceding 500 years. Geoffrey Chaucer, in particular, linked “seynt Valentynes day” to the mating of birds in his poem The Parliament of the Foules, referring to it as a time “Whan euery burd comyth there to chese his make.”¹⁰ By the early 1800’s Europe was well enough ready for the rose as a subtle yet sensual symbol of connection and romantic release.

Today, Valentine’s Day accounts for a quarter of the US flower industry’s annual earnings, totaling $1.9 billion and making up 10% of the holiday’s total expenses.¹¹ Given the flowers’ competitors—no-expense-spared dinners, high-end entertainment, and of course jewelry—one tenth of the pie seems to carry a bit more weight. A weight of more than 8 million pounds, in fact, if you only account for those delivered by mail.¹² All in all, an estimated 250 million roses were produced for the holiday in 2018, of which nearly 90% came from Colombia.¹³

These flowers are flown from Bogotá to Miami in planeloads of 1.1 million, as many as 30 per days in the weeks before Valentine’s Day. From there they are refrigerated and shipped around the country to suppliers and big box stores. Walmart’s order alone totaled 24 million roses in 2019. The scale of this holiday export is so great, in fact, that it makes up to as much as 20% of Colombian growers’ revenue each year. It has been estimated by the Council on Clean Transportation that in the three weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day, these imports use over 30 million gallons of fuel, leading to an output of nearly 360,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.¹⁴ Logistically speaking, floral trade is a unique beast among international exports and imports. Once a flower has matured, speed is the key determinant of its quality and, thus, its cost. The journey from farm to florist takes only about 24 to 48 hours, passing through greenhouses, planes, refrigerated truck, and a pest control inspection at customs. This process of transporting highly perishable products is known in the industry as “cold-chain” logistics, highlighting the extra care and energy that goes into preserving the product.¹⁵

Aside from the invisible logistical architectures that support this transnational tradition, there is an armature of trade policy that has made possible the flood of roses that inundate the United States each February. The overwhelming success of Colombia’s seasonal flower trade with the US is owed in large part to the George H. W. Bush administration and the runaway success of the Colombian cocaine trade. In 1991, in an effort to support non-illicit industries in the region, Congress passed the Andean Trade Preference Act (ATPA). The ATPA lifted duties on various exports from Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, and, most importantly, Colombia, given the country’s massive rate of drug exportation to the United States at the time. With the 6% tax on flowers completely eliminated, Colombia has been freed up to consistently grow their floral exports, which rose to a whopping 694 million cut flowers for the Valentine’s season alone just four years ago.¹⁶

Turkeys | Meleagris gallopavos

If there is any single symbol of American Thanksgiving, it is the turkey—so native to and emblematic of the United States it almost became the national bird.¹⁷ Sadly, for the turkey at least, it instead became the national meal. And now, in keeping with the spirit of abundance that typifies holiday, the turkey is annually overproduced on a national scale each autumn. For Thanksgiving 2015, approximately 46 million turkeys were consumed in the US, according to the National Turkey Federation; however, that word “consumption” describes how much turkey was purchased, not how much was eaten, nor, more importantly, how much was left uneaten. The USDA estimates that more than one third of that—that is to say over 204 million pounds of edible turkey meat in 2016—was thrown out.¹⁸ That much turkey would come at a cost of roughly $293 million, but that is of course not the only cost. The water required to produce this wasted meat alone has been estimated at 100 billion gallons of water, a quantity capable of supplying New York City for 100 days, while the emissions produced from the process have been equated to making 800,000 cross-country trips in the average American car.¹⁹

And of course, the turkeys of today’s Thanksgiving are genetically very different than those of Puritan feasts passed. Thanks to transformations in poultry production associated with military food security during World War II, modern turkeys have been bred selectively to have much broader breasts. Their top-heavy proportions mean that it is difficult for them to stand and nearly impossible for them to mate. As a result, virtually all industrial farmed turkeys produced in the last 70 years have been bred through artificial insemination.²⁰

In addition to the injustices wrought on these animals, the intense demand that 46 million birds be ready to consume for one specific day puts an enormous strain on the systems that support this industry, specifically the workers. Employees at a Butterball processing plant in Huntsville, Arkansas report deboning turkeys at a rate of twenty-four per second, or over 11,000 per shift, along a Taylorist conveyor belt system. Regularly dangerous conditions are exacerbated by long hours in the months leading up to Thanksgiving as employees can work nearly fifty days straight in order to meet the nation’s demand for turkey. Employees refer to this grueling pre-holiday season as la Fresca, meaning “the Fresh,” since the demand for frozen birds drops near to nothing during this time.²¹ The repetitious motions typical of the work line can cause carpal tunnel syndrome and sometimes require surgery while extensive periods of standing and lifting increase the risk of developing chronic musculoskeletal complications. This is especially true during the holidays when these birds can weigh as much as 30-60 pounds. A survey of 500 workers in Arkansas revealed that over 60% had suffered an injury on the job. Even so, official injury reports have been diminishing over the past several decades. According to ex-poultry workers, this drop is only a decline in record-keeping as managers and nurses frequently discourage employees from reporting, at times even threatening them with termination.²²

And, of course, as evidenced by the nickname la fresca, this holiday-supporting labor is largely carried out by immigrants and persons of color. Truly, Thanksgiving has always been a holiday centered on immigration, whether it’s the construction of the folkloric first feast between English invader and indigenous peoples or the propagandizing of that parable to newly arrived European immigrants in the mid-19th century. Today, the consumerist construction of this holiday continues to center the immigrant experience—just this time, instead of at the table, it’s at the poultry processing plant—as cheap labor, bountiful and expendable.

Christmas Trees | Picea abies

Today’s Christmas tree—even if it may still hold a place of mystery and folklore for many—is a heavily engineered product, whether plant-based or plastic. In 2017, Americans purchased a whopping 48.5 million Christmas trees. Slightly over half of those were real; the rest artificial. Study after study has been carried out by the live and fake tree industries in an effort to determine once and for all whose trees get the sales-boosting badge of “sustainable;” however, results tend to skew favorably (and rather expectedly) toward whomever has funded the study. Ultimately, a quantitative analysis by the environmental consulting firm Ellipsos determined that real trees—despite irrigation, fertilization, and transportation—produce only one third of the carbon emissions of a typical fake tree used for six years.²³ That said, the industrial production of live trees still presents significant externalities.

As with any of these holiday monocultures, there are only a few primary sites of production: for live trees in the US, it is Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Living Christmas trees remain incredibly vulnerable to weeds for the first years of their growth and thus require significant herbicide treatment. Atrazine is an endocrine-disrupting commercial herbicide that easily contaminates groundwater, is slow to break down, has been identified as causing birth defects, is banned in 44 countries, and is still considered the weed-control chemical of choice among holiday tree farms.²⁴ Oregon’s Williamette Valley, home to some of the nation’s largest Christmas tree nurseries, most of which are grown on hillsides deemed unsuitable for other crops, has consistently shown signs of atrazine contamination in its rivers and streams.²⁵ In addition to herbicides, Christmas tree farms are practically required to use pesticides so that they are able to maintain their international clients. Live tree harvesting also presents significant drawbacks. Farms commonly start using gas-guzzling helicopters beginning in early November and working seven days a week to ferry fresh-cut trees from stump to truck. Farms report this is the cheapest and fastest way to get the trees to the consumer, given the sloping terrain and the seasonal rush.²⁶

Christmas Trees | Polyvinyl Chloride

It has been said that “Christmas is made in Yiwu,” a small industrial town outside Shanghai that allegedly produces 60% of the world’s Christmas decorations—including over one million artificial trees a year.²⁷ These trees, assembled by workers as young as eleven years-old, are produced from polyvinyl chloride (PVC) which can off gas hazardous volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and often includes heavy metals like barium, tin, and lead.²⁸ Even if only trace amounts of lead are found in these trees—and they have been—factory workers usually wear no more than a surgical mask as protection.²⁹

It is not only the production of the physical matter of American holidays that has been exported around the globe to places like Yiwu, but holidays themselves have become one of the United States most popular exports. The dissociative quality of these exported seasonal identities can be stark. In warmer climates, for example, like Central and South America where December can mean sweltering heat or even the dead of summer, Christmas is still considered incomplete without a plastic evergreen and some snowy scenery.³⁰ Culture and identity spread most effectively when they can intersect with pre-existing values; the early Church understood this and called it syncretism. Today, the globalized consumer marketplace is the common ground—not the solstice, nor the harvest—that makes way for the spreading of culture and values.³¹

With a clear understanding of what it takes to make these holidays material year after year, one must begin to ask is there a better way to proceed with these traditions? Can they be optimized? Can specific traditions like the rose, the turkey, and the tree—traditions that revolve around the production and dissemination of biophysical matter—be redesigned? And, if so, how can this be done in our current constructed environment? The question then is whether or not we are to abandon these traditions altogether. Is the collective cost of monolithic holidays—the socio-environmental implications of scaling them up to the size of a nation, or of several nations—a price too great to bear? Perhaps, instead of interpreting these costs as a dead end, they are actually the formation of new grounds on which to construct the materiality, and thus the logistics, of existing holidays.

As an example, The Living Christmas Tree Company in Los Angeles is currently leading the US market in potted Christmas tree deliveries, a new tradition on the rise as an alternative to both the artificial tree and the chopped live variety. Rental trees do a far better job of sequestering carbon as they have a longer life cycle. They can also reduce the amount of carbon emissions associated with Christmas tree deliveries. Moreover, most Christmas tree rental companies make it a point to batch orders geographically, leading to far fewer miles driven. The living Christmas tree company has even begun to grow their rental trees on brownfield sites, bringing the tree even closer to the consumer while also cleaning these sites by using tree species that are both desirable for the holidays and functional phytoremediators.³² Perhaps there is an expandable model. Given how ubiquitously spread around the nation brownfield sites are, why couldn’t Christmas trees be grown locally on these sites? Currently, there are an estimated 56,442 acres of brownfield sites in the US, just under the total acreage of Christmas trees farms in Oregon by about 11,000. The evergreen tree that long ago signaled the return spring could now become a symbol of a return to productivity for land forced into fallowness by industrial contamination.³³

Certainly, there is some utility in foregrounding process and place in the production of holidays as we know them. There is, after all, a power within ritual practices. It’s the reality that specific actions regarding specific species or commodities will continue to be carried out cyclically across time into the future. Despite annual cries of a “war on Christmas,” holidays on the whole—though they may morph and change over the longue durée in response to the momentary zeitgeist—don’t seem to be disappearing altogether anytime soon. Tradition, as Eric Hobsbawm understood, is a resource; it is action codified and reliable, extending in perpetuity. Tradition is a stabilizing force, something that capital reproduction desperately desires.³⁴

Avocados | Persea americana

Though many of the biggest, most recognizable American holidays come from traditions of agrocentric wisdom, others are manufactured out of whole cloth with little regard to seasons as they exist climactically. Instead, they often respond to other timelines, perhaps national ones, as is the case for Independence Day and President’s Day, or even the American football calendar in the case of Super Bowl Sunday. This non-holiday holiday was essentially invented as “the Super Bowl” in a marketing campaign to make the “AFL-NFL World Championship Game” a bit more appealing in name. Since its launch in 1966, the Super Bowl has gained traction as a major event on the American calendar, with 60.9 million planning to attend a Super Bowl party in 2019 adding up to a total consumer price tag of $14.8 billion.³⁵ That January, the Super Bowl made some rather unusual headlines as expectant party goers awaited to find out the fate of a favorite foodstuff, a Super Bowl staple: the avocado.

In late 2018 in the four weeks leading up to Super Bowl LII, the Mexican state of Michoacán, the world’s biggest exporter of avocados, sent approximately 200 million pounds of hass avocados to the United States in order to satisfy Americans’ hankering for the increasingly popular fruit and for its derivative, the stereotypical tailgater’s mainstay: guacamole.³⁶ According to the Association of Mexican Avocado Producers and Exporters (APEAM), in order to meet the sudden Super Bowl demand, one 18-ton truckload of avocados crosses the border into the US every six minutes, amounting to 1,335 refrigerated trucks per week.³⁷ This past year, however, there was a hiccup in the international avocado supply chain just before the big game. Following a year of fuel theft, Pemex—the federally owned and operated petrol company—shut down a series of pipelines in an effort to curb cartel-related crime, crime tied to the avocado trade in fact. The unintended side effect of the decision was a debilitating fuel shortage that locked multiple states in a logistical paralysis, posing a serious threat to economic and social stability.³⁸ If Americans heard of the crisis at all, however, it was mostly through the press surrounding Super Bowl LIII. In the weeks leading up to the big games, articles began to bemoan the fact that only a meager 54 million pounds of avocado had made it out of Michoacán and into the US by the start of January—signs, as they reported, of an impending “guacpocalypse.”³⁹

What then might happen if we continue along this path and fully relinquish the calendar to the consumerist economy? Surely, just as in the case of the Super Bowl, there are voids within the year that have yet to be exploited, voids that only need a common cause and a material mascot. Perhaps in the future, our perception of time will be liberated from the climate altogether. Many already mark the passing of the year by the emergence of new generations of smart phones. Maybe the release of hard and soft technologies like Apple’s much-awaited September launches or Netflix’s monthly content updates will define time in a more meaningful way than seasons or seasonal aisles. We are already beholden to the cycles of updates to our many devices; this is but a new cycle of seasons, emanating from the perennial summer of Silicon Valley.

In short, contemporary holidays are ripe for another takeover, a new adaptation. It is time they be seen through the lens of the urban metabolist and incorporated, as a natural human process, into the ecologies out of which they arose, otherwise, like any form of hyper-capitalist urbanization, their continued existence could in time spell their own demise. But what could the reinvention of holidays look like? One must start at the point of globalization, understanding that so many holidays are a recapitulation of a geographically specific time, or flow of time. They are sociobiological responses to environmental conditions of some degree of reliability through observable repetition. The modernist or globalist response to the cultural constructs that mediate humans’ relationship to space and time is to flatten it and reproduce it, transporting very specific temporospatialities across territories to create new hybridized geographies of time.

Bats | Tadarida brasiliensis

The response to this modernist project is the radical re-localization of time. Instead of creating time in the image of the culturally and commercially communicated season, radically re-localized time responds to the conditions around it, highlighting subtle changes and celebrating space as it unfolds in a unique and specific way within a certain locality. This can look like a heightened awareness of the annual migration of certain species, the coming of seasonal rains, or the steady waves of regionally specific springtime blossoms. In Austin, this kind of timekeeping takes shape as Bat Fest, a celebration of the northward migration of roughly 1.5 million Mexican free-tailed bats lasting from early March to the first cold front in October. The bats’ habitation within the Congress Street Bridge serves as a signifier of the long Texan summer. The fourteen-year-old mid-August festival is centered around the emergence of these mammals en masse as they set out at dusk in search of food. Bat Fest functions much like any other holiday in respect to the city’s economy, drawing tourists and causing a spending spike for restaurants and retail.

Such seasonal festivals are nowhere near rare. They merely lack the infrastructures of holiday making that defines the mainstream holiday identities. The question for designers is how to intervene in these spaces to create the armatures that support reading locality through modalities of time. Such work doesn’t have to remain in the hands of the landscape architect. In the case of Austin’s bats, the reason they take shelter within the Congress Street Bridge is because of a structural redesign of the bridge in 1980 that resulted in more concealed space with smaller apertures, a perfect microhabitat for a bat colony.⁴⁰ Austin’s bats reveal that urban ecology is dependent on far more than the creation or preservation of green space. Novel ecosystems—particularly those expressed across time—like the temporary habitation of the Congress Street Bridge implicate everyone from preservationists to urban planners to civil engineers as actors within the process of eco-spatial timekeeping.

Humans have adapted to living at nearly every latitude; our cultural focus on the temperate climate is little more than a colonial perspective on how we ought to read time. Of course, passage of time itself cannot be redesigned, but how it is experienced—to what degree, through what media, and to whose benefit—is well within our control. The calendar, contested though it may be, remains open. The question now, simply put, is who will fill the voids?