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As a chill begins to take hold in the air — well, kind of — folks are eagerly thumbing through their sweater collections, stirring soups, and lining up for their pumpkin spice lattes. The Fall Industrial Complex tells us it’s a beautiful, cozy yet temperate time of the year. But I’m here to say fall is completely overrated.
Multiple surveys have shown fall is Americans’ favorite season. A 2022 poll from Morning Consult, for instance, found 41 percent of Americans listed fall as their top season, compared with 24 percent for spring and summer, and 11 percent for winter. I’d argue 41 percent of Americans are wrong.
I don’t particularly understand the love for fall. Do you all really love Halloween and pumpkin patches that much? Those are actual cited reasons in a 2023 poll.
First, let’s look at fall, the season, before the fall the trend — because autumn has absolutely become A Thing, especially online. The season begins around Sept. 22 every year and runs through early or mid December, depending on if you use a meteorological or astronomical definition. During the prime fall months, October and November, the average temperature in the U.S. was around 56 and 44 degrees, respectively, in 2023. That’s pretty cold! And it’ll be chillier in the states where the seasons change the most, aka where those pretty leaves exist. And it’s also often overcast and gloomy in the parts of the country that get the weather we most associate with fall. I think, in folks’ minds, they picture fall as a perfect Autumn day: 61 degrees, sun out, slight chill, orange-leafed trees, light-jacket weather. In reality, you’re far more likely to get such a day in late May or early September, which is late spring or late summer. (And California, or other similar states, don’t get on my case about your sweltering September heat waves. You don’t count because your whole “winter” is your closest approximation of fall).
Granted, the Earth is warming and fall is getting warmer and wetter, but that isn’t necessarily a good thing, either. At best, most fall days you’re getting the kind of day where you can be long-sleeved at midday, but need a sweater at the ready for when the sun goes down early.
I truly, fully do not understand why summer is not everyone’s favorite season. I’m not trying to be contrarian but it’s a belief I’ve long held.
The summer is when all the fun things happen! It’s when you get to be outside, in the fresh air, all the time. Going to the beach, seeing a sporting event (in a t-shirt), swimming, hiking, beers on a patio, golf, riding a bike, watching TV inside in the air-conditioning — nearly any activity is possible in the summertime. Oh you can’t ski? I’m so sorry you can’t freeze your ass off while desperately trying to avoid a broken leg. You can do lots of fun things in the fall, but I’d argue most any of them — and much more — are available in the summer. People hold out hope for the perfect fall day you get once in a while, rather than the countless fantastic summer days. And sure, as a dude who sweats at the slightest movement, I get that the summer can be too hot — duh — but that opens the door for a nice shower, a dip in a pool, or jumping in the ocean. I’d rather recover from the heat after doing fun things than be limited from doing them altogether.
You actually like shorter days? Leaves are really that beautiful to you? I don’t see it.
Why does fall have to be a trend?
I’d argue that some folks love the idea of fall more than the reality of it. Once something becomes A Thing — especially online — people feel like they have to enjoy it. Everyone absolutely loved Hamilton until everyone didn’t. And you’d have to be logged off for years not to recognize fall as A Thing online. As Mashable’s Elena Cavender wrote in a 2021 piece titled “Fall is still the internet’s favorite season“: “In the first week of fall, Twitter and TikTok became inundated with fall movies, fall outfits, fall playlists, fall recipes. It’s Christian Girl Autumn, Meg Ryan Fall, the time we can really start dressing.”
Sure, we get viral recipes in all seasons, but none get the treatment of pumpkin spice everything or the ubiquity of people loving so-called Soup Season online. I love Soup Szn as much as the next guy, and pumpkin spice has its time and place, I suppose, but I also enjoy eating with every season. I love tomatoes sandwiches in the summer or an herbaceous spring salad. But those things aren’t memes. They’re just good food.
The PSL was invented by Starbucks in 2003, but pumpkin spice truly spiked as a food trend around 2010, spice-maker McCormick told USA Today.
“We have a global report called the ‘Flavor Forecast’ and then we identified pumpkin pie spice in 2010 as an emerging trend, and that was really at the beginning of where we started to see, both in restaurants and in (the) home, use start to pick up,” Kevan Vetter, executive chef at McCormick, told the paper in 2022.
That is, not coincidentally, right around the time Twitter became super-popular and Instagram launched. It was an original food trend that stuck around because it’s almost foundational to the social media ecosystem. Lining up for your first PSL of the season has become so rote it’s a meme. The fall memes have only grown from there.
I generally skeptical of most things that become A Thing online. At some point the merits of the thing are surpassed by the terminal velocity of the internet’s hunger to jump on a trend.
What if fall is just another season and not necessarily the best one? What if it has its merits — football, some beautiful days, colorful leaves — but those merits are not necessarily far and away better than other times of the year? What if the idea of a hot bowl of soup, a soft sweater, a spiced latte, are better than the actuality of lots of overcast days that are chilly outside but too hot to turn on the heat inside?
What if — hear me out — people force their love onto fall as a means of coping with the recent passage of the actual best season, summer?
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Americans really love fall. But maybe it’s not all that deserved.
