Memes

To be fair, people like holidays and it's tradition far older than capitalism, the calendar in most of catholic and orthodox countries (and afaik the nonchristian religions aren't that much different in that) since medieval up to even XX century in some places was literally counted not by months and days, but from holiday to holiday and there was dozens of them, so every few days except maybe the great fast there was this or that holiday. Capitalism just took the heavily cutted protestant version and concentrated the holidays even further, but the actual celebrations are just few days (we can't give proles too much free days, we need the labour to steal!) so that the preparations got extended beyond the wildest expectations.