The weather is getting cold, the streets are lit with decor, and it seems you cannot look at your TV or phone without seeing something Christmas related. But other holidays go largely unnoticed.

Traditions like Hanukkah and Kwanzaa, while sometimes mentioned, seem entirely overlooked. It makes sense that media companies would prioritize Christmas, as 85 percent of Americans celebrate it (Statista.com), while only 5 percent celebrate Hanukkah, and 3 percent celebrate Kwanzaa a study at the University of Chicago found. 

However, this line of logic can be flawed, as the reason that so few celebrate them could be that there is no awareness of these holidays. Very few pieces of media even acknowledge these marginalized holidays.

On IMDb, a catalog of pretty much every movie, there are 9,537 movies tagged with the keyword Christmas, while there are only 100 movies with Hanukkah and only 18 with Kwanzaa. This is not at all proportionate to how many people celebrate these holidays, with Hanukkah getting 0.016% as many movies as Christmas, and Kwanzaa getting a tiny 0.0018% as many.

This seems entirely unfair to the people who really cherish these holidays, millions of Americans are represented by a handful of movies. It’s a very big deal to some people, and to just sideline them for marketability is very culturally ignorant. The entertainment industry should show some love to traditions that they previously ignored. It would mean a lot to many people, and it is likely that they would go see such a movie, or watch such a TV show if it was done well. The same is true across all forms of entertainment, including books and songs.