Holiday(less) seasons

Why don't we have a major holiday during the summer, while we have several during cool or cold periods?

Approaching the end of summer I am thinking about...Christmas, the optimal timing of holidays, and consumption-smoothing. Why don't we have a major holiday during the summer, while we have several during cool or cold periods? Here is one reason (there could be several, and maybe there is a paper, article or post somewhere out there which makes the same argument):

Take the standard idea of consumption smoothing. Utility-maximizing consumers in general smooth their consumption across time periods. I won’t go into details here and now. The question arises, why do we then concentrate so much consumption of several goods, and I may add, festive experiences, during the winter (and for those who read this in the US: also the late autumn) period? Maybe in harder times we needed to take in more calories during colder periods. Yet I believe there also must be other reasons. Many (though not all!) people are somewhat sad when the summer period ends. Why? An important reason is that, notwithstanding our frequent complaints about heat waves, the summer provides us with a relatively pleasant environment in which to conduct pleasant activities; from swimming or reading on the beach to visiting new places. More formally, weather is an important environmental input in our “household production functions”; when we create experiences, we take these environmental variables and combine them with our own inputs; our time, energy, markets goods, and other resources. In other words. these environmental inputs can raise or lower the real cost of producing experiences. A “naive” consumption-smoothing perspective can miss this important insight of Beckerian household economics; for first and foremost, we care not about the consumption of different market goods, but about the things we want to achieve with them, such as pleasant experiences. Provided we maximize utility, we allocate our time, money and energy across the different seasons in such a way as to equate the ratio of marginal utilities between time periods with the ratio of the costs of producing experiences in the different periods. What does that imply? It implies that in the winter, when certain beneficial environmental factors are simply not there, our marginal utility should be greater, as the cost of “producing utility” is higher. Our marginal utilities will be higher if we consume fewer commodities or experiences and thus will have less utility (hence the sadness over the passing of the summer!). Fortunately, however, the decrease in pleasant experiences during the winter need not be very large, for inputs in our household production functions can be, to some extent, substituted. Thus during the winter period, when it’s cold outside, we “spend” a lot of time, goods and energy (not just personal energy but also lots of fuel) to create good experiences, such as “Christmas cheer”. And I didn’t even mention so far the start of major sports seasons at the beginning of Autumn!

This post, as it stands, is just a short sketch (and may contain errors!) and I may expand on these themes later, perhaps during the winter holidays…