A yearning for the stability of fairy lights and childhood positive memories is what seems to be on the cards.
It’s time to get festive. Well, at least the decorations that have been on sale for a month already tell us so.
But another season to be jolly is closing in and surprisingly, Gen Z is leading the charge in ho-ho-hoing.
This, from the same generation that’s been accused of cancelling popular culture as everyone else’s come to know it.
Gen Z’s seem to have dusted off the baubles, rolled out the tinsel and if social media is anything to go by, reinvented traditional Christmas to feel fresh, but nostalgic.
It’s back to values and feelings of comfort and familiarity and about, importantly, creating meaning.
Remembering simpler times
Gen Z’s formative years included a pandemic, wars and political shenanigans like the world has never seen before.
A yearning for the stability of fairy lights and childhood positive memories is what seems to be on the cards.
Feeling those feelings again instead of the mental-health decimating reality that the world faces, daily.
TikTok added cool to Christmas
Hashtags like #Christmas2000s and #90sChristmas have helped Gen Z discover decorations from years past like tinsel and eighties and nineties style nostalgia.
On TikTok, old ads, home videos, and vintage décor clips have become emotional comfort food.
Gen Z does not just watch these; they curate and create new versions of them. Christmas has become a social media post-fest of the good old days, in the now.
Vintage aesthetic
Gen Z has added a vintage aesthetic to its collective celebration of the festive season.
Getting jolly includes soft pastel pink ribbons and old pine cones sprayed in colourful expressions.
There are some of Granny’s ornaments and thrifting elements on the tree.
It’s less about greens and reds and retail rendezvous and more vintage and playful. Memory meets mood and it’s almost as if it’s a remix of Christmas, a festive-positive approach.
Device-free festivities
While the runway to Christmas day may be lived through devices, posts and aesthetic celebration, presence is everything on the day.
With a selfie or 20, Gen Z is ditching malls for moments in time.
Family dinners, togetherness activities like tree decorating and crafts like handwritten cards help ground the balance of global malaise.
Gen Z cares more about who’s with them on the day than what’s under the tree.
Christmas is a handbrake
The festive season also allows for pause. It’s a handbrake on the manic pace of the world, for a moment.
Gen Z loves this and loves the carol and candlelight moments, the fuzzy socks, the sparkles and the simple stuff.
It’s a comfort aesthetic and allows for a momentary lapse of screen time living. It is also a stress release, and importantly, a moment to breathe.
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It’s experiential not grand
It’s not about how much you spend during the season as much as it is about what you buy and what you gift.
Priceless is the aesthetic and comprises moments and feelings more than price tags and malls.
Sharing personalised playlists, small gatherings with friends, playing some board games with the family.
That’s where it’s at for Gen Z. Simplicity is the trend.
Rewriting Christmas
Gen Z are not cancelling Christmas traditions. Instead, they are rewriting the rules, slowly.
Retail does not fit into the equation as much as posting a letter to Santa makes for childhood memory reprises.
Grand gestures and expensive gifts are making way for meaning, choosing a present that shows presence and care – and taking time to connect with the ones they love.
Christmas for Gen Z is about traditional values, spiced up to suit a 21st-century, almost cyber-hippie-like state of being.
It’s about doing what feels right, and not what costs the most.
