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When we noted in June that Spirit Halloween was advertising to hire 50,000 seasonal employees, what seemed newsworthy was its staffing up four months before the holiday. We had no inkling, however, that a summer variant of the holiday was right around the coroner corner.
Enter Summerween.
On TikTok, videos on how to put a summertime twist on the October holiday have proliferated, including one from @sheri_wilson_ about her essentials for a Summerween party on June 22 that garnered 5.6 million views.
The video includes elements of the newly minted tradition that are turning up in other TikTok videos, including grilled cheeseburgers with sliced cheese in the shape of jack-o-lanterns, a pumpkin-colored float with orange soda and a scoop of vanilla ice cream, and the coup de grâce, a watermelon carved into a jackomelon.
Scare quotes: Retailers have been quick to capitalize.
Michaels was early with Halloween merch this year, which started arriving in stores the week of June 24, compared to July 7 last year, Rachel Peterson, head of corporate and product communications at the retailer, explained in an email to Retail Brew. Michaels issued a July 23 press release about its offerings with the headline “Summerween is in full swing.”
In an August 1 post on X, Spirit Halloween announced—this may sound vaguely familiar—“summerween szn is in full swing.”
On Amazon, Summerween items popped up quickly, including one T-shirt featuring a ghost riding a flamingo that first appeared on July 5, and another that says “Happy Summerween” with a jackomelon that was added May 31.
Ditto for Etsy.
Ghosted: The notion appeared to have originated in October 2012, when an episode of the Disney animated series Gravity Falls called “Summerween” first aired.
Google Trends, which goes back to 2004, shows virtually no searches for “Summerween” in the US until that month in 2012. But the interest in the term peaked this July when, compared to that first burst 12 years ago, there were more than three times as many searches for Summerween.
If this all rings a bell, maybe you’re thinking of Chrismukkah, the blended holiday popularized in an episode of The OC in 2003. As this reporter noted in his local paper in 2016, it also spawned merch, including the Yamaclaus, a fluffy Santa Claus hat in the shape of a yarmulke.