If your social media feeds have started filling up with pictures of jack-o-lanterns and witches, don’t worry — you didn’t pass out in your chaise lounge and wake up in October. What you’re seeing is a phenomenon known as Summerween.
It’s a movement fueled in large part by the online crafting community, where artists blend the tropes of summer — watermelons, surfboards and sunglasses — with iconic Halloween images like vampires, graveyards and ghosts.
Summerween has been around for a while — the beloved Disney Channel show "Gravity Falls" aired an entire episode about it back in 2012.
But this summer, it’s expanded from the world of cult-favorite TV shows and Instagram posts to the pages of the New York Times and the airwaves of Good Morning America.
So why now — and why here in Arizona, where Summerween has been lovingly embraced by the local craft community? Kathy Cano-Murillo is a Phoenix-based artist who you can find at craftychica.com, and she spoke with The Show more about it.
Full conversation
KATHY CANO-MURILLO: You know, it just kind of takes the edge off of summer a little bit to make it a little more cute and cool than what we're used to this summer here.
DINGMAN: I've lived here for four months. Definitely not cute. Definitely not cool with apologies to my new state.
CANO-MURILLO: I also think it just, you know, allows our creativity to have fun and go wherever we want it to go. We're letting go of the rules.
DINGMAN: And how much of that do you think, you know, since you mentioned Christmas time, there are other holidays that people love to riff on from a craft standpoint. You mentioned like bat wings on sunglasses, and there are other holidays that don't move around in the calendar as much Christmas, Easter. We don't really see these things remixed in quite the same way as we do Halloween. What do you attribute that to?
CANO-MURILLO: Well, I think Halloween is just more fun than Easter, TBH. That's my perspective anyways because I don't see people wanting to have like an Easter pool party kind of thing where …
DINGMAN: I don’t even know what that would look like.
CANO-MURILLO: Exactly. And I think it's cool. A lot of people are saying enough with the pumpkin spice lattes. Like, we are, we are, you know, rewriting our own drinks and festivities that we are going to have. So, you know, you see a lot of ghost-themed popsicles and the carved watermelons that look like jack-o’-lanterns. It's just so creative. I've even seen pineapples. People are carving pineapples to look like jack-o’-lanterns and you can't do that with Easter.
DINGMAN: Do you think there's any element to it also that some other holidays have become kind of politicized?
CANO-MURILLO: Oh, yes, I have talked to many people who did not feel like decorating for Fourth of July this year and we won't go into that, but that's just how they feel. And Summerween was a great way to still express their creativity and have fun and enjoy the summer, be with family and friends decorate and feel good about it and take the edge off of all of the stress that is happening in the world, even for a short amount of time. It feels a little bit naughty to be working on fall projects in the summertime.
DINGMAN: Well, and if I may, there's something interesting to me about that, that Halloween seems like you can lean into that, that naughtiness a little bit because there's less of an overt religious valence to it. Or like you said, with the Fourth of July, it feels like you're messing with patriotism and the flag if, if you, you know, there's only so much you can do to an American flag before people start having opinions. And I know there are some people for whom Halloween is sacred but it seems a little bit more culturally permissible to mess with the tropes.
CANO-MURILLO: Oh, yes. And I know my husband's at home right now making Little Bride of Frankenstein ladies by the pool because it's just so fun to combine these two traditions together as an artist.
DINGMAN: Are there any traditions that you feel like are too sacred to mess with?
CANO-MURILLO: I think the main one for me, like with Dia De Los Muertos, I like to keep that very traditional and constantly educate people that it is not Mexican Halloween. It has nothing to do with Halloween. Just constantly reminding people how they are two totally separate things.
DINGMAN: Can you tell people who might be listening and didn't realize that Dia De Los Muertos is not Mexican Halloween? Tell us what the important difference is there.
CANO-MURILLO: Oh, yes. Well, Dia De Los Muertos, it's an ancient Mexican Aztec tradition, over 3,000 years old, where you honor your loved ones, your ancestors who came before you and you build an ofrenda, you put their picture, you can write a note to them. You keep a candle burning. You have copal incense, the marigold flowers. Every single thing on that ofrenda, the offering, is to draw their spirit back on Nov. 1 and 2.
One day is for children and one day is for adults and it's a time to welcome their spirits back, celebrate their life. It celebrates the cycle of life that we are all on together. We're just on different timelines of that cycle and just remembering the things that they love to do and making them feel welcome. So it's very meaningful.
DINGMAN: Something that feels like it's emerging for me in our conversation is this sense that there are some holidays where, and I'm being, I'm generalizing here, but there are some holidays where the goal is to connect with a tradition, whether that's a family tradition or a tradition of an organized religion of some kind. And then there are other holidays where it feels more like we're looking to connect with a feeling.
And Halloween seems in particular to me like one of those holidays where it's a feeling that we want to connect with and maybe that gives us a little bit more leeway to express that feeling whenever and however we want to.
CANO-MURILLO: Yes, because Halloween is so playful. It takes us back to our childhood where we were trying to come up with a costume, wearing it to school. Maybe some of us, our mom stayed up all night sewing our costumes, that lamé gold rickrack was fire and it celebrating Halloween as an adult, it brings back those memories of how special it is of our childhood and our families of being a little kid. And then when we have our own kids trying to share that magic with them.
DINGMAN: One thing that we haven't talked about that I was, I guess, sort of expecting us to talk about is there's this thing that's happening in culture where things that we remember loving and that don't exist anymore. We want them back. You know, we want new versions of our favorite Disney movies. We want reunion tours from our favorite bands from the ‘90s. That's a big thing right now.
Do you see a connection between that and Summerween or does Summerween feel like a different kind of nostalgia to you?
CANO-MURILLO: I think there's a little bit of that, but I also think that we are in a time where it is exciting to find something new and this is something new. We all want to be that person that says, look at this jack-o’-lantern I just made from a watermelon. “Why did you do that in a watermelon?” It’s for Summerween, haven't you heard of it? “Oh my God. I love that, Summerween.”
And it just goes off from there and it's like, “I heard that Summerween from Kathy,” like, really like we crave that sense of newness and being the person that shares it with our friends. So I think a lot of it is just the excitement of a new category to celebrate a new type of holiday.
DINGMAN: I have to say there's something really interesting to me about that because Halloween is so associated with, not to be morbid but death, you know, creatures from beyond the grave, ghosts. Yes. Exactly. So, the idea of repositioning it to summer and allowing it to be a time of rebirth of discovering new things. There's something kind of sweet about that.
CANO-MURILLO: Yes, because, I mean, I'm sure Dracula would like to sip on a smoothie by the pool on a coffin floaty. You know, like he gets tired of hanging out in October all the time. I'm sure maybe at night time. Not in full sunlight.
