For the creator of the short-lived Disney cartoon “Gravity Falls,” necessity was the mother of invention. The show, which ran from 2012–2016, takes place during summer vacation, when twins Mabel and Dipper travel to a small town in Oregon that, according to their great-uncle, Grunkle Stan, “loves Halloween so much they celebrate it twice a year.” The creator of the “Simpsons”–meets–”Scooby-Doo” show, Alex Hirsch, told Polygon in 2024 that the show needed a way to explain the Halloween-themed episode at the end of the show’s first season. And if any fictional town could make twice-a-year-Halloween seem reasonable, it was Gravity Falls, which teemed with paranormal mystery and intrigue.
There’s some precedent for fictional holidays becoming real ones: “The O.C.” offered up the interfaith holiday solution of Chrismukkah, “Parks and Recreation” put Galentine’s Day on the calendar, and Festivus, introduced via “Seinfeld,” appears to still be going strong. Still, those holidays do have the benefit of being either a single day or a collection of days that temporally coincide with winter’s existing holidays. Summerween is a different story, in part because there’s no official date for it (though the citizens of Gravity Falls celebrated on June 22) and in part because so many retailers now start stocking their shelves for Halloween as early as July 5. The increasingly porous boundaries of spooky season have made Summerween feel like the first truly YOLO holiday — whatever you want it to be, at whatever time of summer you want it to happen. And, for that matter, whatever you want it to look like.
