Over the past 2 years my family and I have sold 99% of our possessions and in July 2025 we moved with 12 suitcases. We’ve now been settled in our new place for about 3 months. We found a furnished apartment to rent and are in the process of arranging it to make it feel like home. But what makes a space feel like home? Is it the items from stores to decorate the space? Is it the layout for functionality and comfort? Is it the time spent together? It can be easy to fill a space with things, and that is what we have done before. We don’t want to repeat that pattern as we are actively working to decenter consumerism.
There was a certain immediacy that we had access to where we lived before when it came to consumerism. If we wanted something, we ordered it. There were multiple stores we had access to that sold a little bit of everything. It was very easy to enter with one thing in mind to buy and come out with so many others that weren’t needed but were cute. Now, it’s quite different because we don’t have access to the same avenues of immediacy and it’s requiring us to take a pause before following through. If we want something, we now take an extra moment because if it doesn’t fit in the cart we have, then we either have to carry it on our walk home or carry it on the bus. We don’t have a car to load our items in. We also no longer have Amazon Prime, because fuck them.
I didn’t know how our experience would be during the holiday season. Halloween is our favorite holiday and the Halloween Spirit Store was a place we’d frequent multiple times a week to look around, bask in the Halloween season, or buy items. No such store exists where we live. In fact, there are not that many places that sell Halloween decorations in the same capacity. When we found decorations, I sensed my impulsive tendencies wanting to kick in. I thought of ways we could decorate with what was offered and how to have a similar feeling of how home once felt during the holiday. But here’s the thing, we aren’t here to repeat patterns. We are here to do things very differently. We are working to decenter consumerism and deconstruct so many societal pressured patterns. That means exploring and creating a whole new way that a space can feel like home along with the intersectionality of the holiday season.
In 2024, total Halloween spending in the Sates was an estimated $11.6 billion. There is a fast fashion approach to Halloween costumes and decorations because they are usually single use, have long decomposition times, create plastic pollution, burden the landfill, and contribute to textile waste. We explored alternatives and decided to make our costumes and decorations this year. I looked online to find some crochet patterns and made pumpkin heads for our costume and a garland. During a gathering with some friends, our son engaged in an activity of making a spiderweb out of branches he found and white yarn. He also did Halloween arts and crafts at home and made a zombie head and pumpkin.
I thought there would be a sense of feeling proud of ourselves about decentering consumerism in this capitalist world, as if our favorite holiday season put us to the ultimate test and we somehow passed. But there is no test and it’s a daily practice in this capitalist hellscape. The real take away from this experience was the pure connection of creating and crafting together and the conversations we had. Our son problem solved how to make a pumpkin and felt excited about the execution once he completed it. We have the start of decorations that can be passed down through generations with memories tied to them. It’s the reminder that creation, skills sharing, and creativity are important foundations as they are connected to the exploration and creation of alternative ways of engaging with the world, micro or macro level.
Links to crochet patterns I used:
Skulls, Ghosts, Bats, Cats, and Pumpkin Heads