I asked ChatGPT and Gemini to invent a new winter holiday — here’s what they came up with
SOURCE:TechRadar|BY: Eric Hal Schwartz
When asked to invent a new winter holiday, ChatGPT and Gemini delivered radically different visions.
(Image credit: ChatGPT)
December is full of holidays with traditions and festivities stretching back thousands of years (or 30 years if you celebrate Festivus). But as someone who experiments with the odd ways AI models interpret the vast amount of data provided to them by humans, I was curious to see what they might identify as additional winter holidays. I asked ChatGPT and Gemini to invent a new winter holiday to find out.
I specified that the holidays couldn’t resemble Christmas, Hanukkah, New Year’s, or other pre-existing solstice-time holidays. I wanted them to develop holidays that might reflect actual human behavior and interests, even if that means activities that seem trivial or bizarre out of context.
Thawmark and The Clatter
Both AI models start with the idea that people get restless and feel trapped by the winter months. How humans use holidays to react to that universal feeling is where they diverge. ChatGPT produced a quiet, thoughtful holiday about warmth called "Thawmark," while Gemini made a holiday called "The Clatter," a festival with a definite article celebrating defiance and chaos.
ChatGPT introduced Thawmark by setting up a common scenario:
"If you live somewhere winter really shows up with attitude, you eventually learn a strange truth: by late January, you’re not tired of the cold so much as you’re tired of yourself inside the cold. Your routines get smaller. Your world shrinks to heated rooms, quick errands, and the same three thoughts ricocheting around your skull like a trapped moth. Thawmark is the holiday people invented to interrupt that shrinkage."
Held on “the first clear Sunday after the deepest midwinter stretch,” Thawmark is a “low-stakes re-expansion” without the burden of optimism. " People call it 'putting a notch in winter,' like marking a trail so you don’t feel lost in it."
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By contrast, Gemini’s The Clatter suggests a more punk rock reaction to winter:
"If you feel like the walls of your home have been leaning in on you since December, you’re ready for it. The Clatter isn’t about being cozy or "mindful"; it is a mid-winter breaking of the stagnation. It emerged naturally from the "cabin fever" of Northern climates—that point in February when the air is dead and the routine of being indoors has become a mental prison. The purpose of The Clatter is Spatial Defiance. It is a day to prove to yourself that you are not a ghost haunting your own hallways, but a physical force capable of changing your environment."
The holiday lands on the second Friday of February, with no buildup. “You simply wake up and realize the ‘heavy air’ of winter needs to be moved.”
Both holidays have plenty of interesting 'traditions' to mark the occasion, as you can see from Thawmark's above.
Thawmark begins with a “Small Repair”:
“It can be sewing a button, tightening a wobbly chair leg, clearing one shelf… It’s not productivity, and nobody brags about it. The rule is: it must be finished before noon, and it must be small enough not to ruin the day.”
Later, you take a “Marking Walk,” a quiet loop around the neighborhood to notice what winter has done while you were hibernating:
“You’re meant to notice which trees look brittle, which corner store changed their window display, which neighbor has a new doormat. People wave more than they talk.”
There's even a modern addition to the holiday called "The Low Battery Pledge." Basically, from noon to the end of the holiday, you try to keep your phone at 20% or less without letting it die.
"It’s a symbolic constraint that changes behavior. You stop doomscrolling because you can’t afford it. You stop answering work messages because you can claim you’re conserving battery. You take fewer photos and end up more present."
The holiday peaks in the afternoon with a chain of “Borrowed Heat Stops,” where neighbors open their homes for 10-minute warmth breaks. Each stop has a prompt – something like “What are you quietly proud you survived?” though nobody is required to talk. You warm your hands, sip a drink, and leave before anyone has to carry the conversation.
During the day, you'll also experience Thawmark’s signature Steamglass drink. ChatGPT explained that Steamglass is:
“Hot water poured over something aromatic but not fancy—orange peel, ginger slices, a sprig of rosemary… served in a clear glass or mug on purpose, because the whole ritual is watching the clouding swirl as it steeps. You don’t walk around with it. You stand still. You feel the steam. You take one sip and look like winter has won for a second. Then you laugh and take another."
The day ends with the “Check-Out Clap”: three claps, one long exhale, and a silly noise of your choosing, like a kazoo or squeaky toy. It’s brief and unserious, but “oddly moving.”
The Clatter celebrations
(Image credit: Gemini)
The Clatter is the opposite of subtle. It begins with “The Furniture Migration.”
“Every household must move its heaviest piece of furniture… into a room where it absolutely does not belong. Seeing a bed in the kitchen or a dining table in the entryway ‘breaks the eyes.’”
At noon, participants perform “The Vessel Echo,” in which everyone takes their largest empty pots, scoops up the freezing outside air, and dumps it into the corners of their rooms. While doing this, they strike the side of the vessel once—a single, loud metallic ping to ‘shake the dust’ off the silence.”
All day, people “scuff” around the house in thick socks, creating a low, constant shushing sound. The house becomes a friction machine. Where Thawmark is soft social choreography, Clatter is staged absurdism.
That includes the signature Snap-Block dish. As Gemini describes it, Snap-Block is:
“A dense, frozen slab of savory broth, root vegetables, and extreme amounts of black pepper and ginger… You crack off ‘shards’ of the frozen soup with a small hammer or heavy knife… and suck on the spicy, icy fragments until they melt in your mouth. It’s violent and jarring by design. The sensation is meant to “wake up the throat” and to contrast the sensory flatness of late winter."
Kid celebrations
One way to see how well a holiday goes is to see how kids experience it compared to adults. For kids, Thawmark becomes a scavenger day. During the Marking Walk, children participate in “Token Hunt”:
“They’re encouraged to find the ‘best’ winter token, which in kid logic means the most dramatic: the curliest twig, the smoothest rock, the leaf that looks like a monster’s ear.”
During heat stops, they play “Warmth Mapping”:
“Kids get a piece of paper shaped like a mitten and a crayon, and they color where they feel warmest in the house… It also teaches them to notice comfort as something you can locate and share.”
Meanwhile, The Clatter is designed to explode household rules. Children are invited to treat the home like a fort:
“They are allowed—and encouraged—to climb over the ‘migrated’ furniture… Since the house is ‘broken’ for the day, the normal rules of ‘don’t jump on that’ disappear. In other words: maximum permission. The house becomes a playground."
In Thawmark, children are trained to observe and reflect, to notice changes in their surroundings and feel ownership over comfort. In Clatter, they’re trained to break rules for joy, to reroute energy through play and disruption. Both approaches understand childhood well, albeit emphasizing different aspects of it.
AI holidays
(Image credit: Gemini)
Both AI models succeeded in making a new holiday and a set of traditions for the winter. Notably, they both found ways to connect emotional patterns to them. ChatGPT and Gemini demonstrated that they can simulate culture through storytelling.
Not that there aren't differences between the two of them. ChatGPT’s Thawmark offers small and believable rituals. Gemini took a more over-the-top approach with The Clatter. It rewards loudness, inversion, and physical disruption
Neither AI actually feels these things, of course. But it's fascinating how they both look at how humans feel about long winters and came up with holidays to mess with that.
If you’re someone who needs to ease out of winter with a cup of hot water and a shared laugh at your own awkwardness, Thawmark might be your favorite new holiday. If you’re someone who needs to scream into a trash can and rearrange the furniture, The Clatter has you covered.
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Eric Hal Schwartz is a freelance writer for TechRadar with more than 15 years of experience covering the intersection of the world and technology. For the last five years, he served as head writer for Voicebot.ai and was on the leading edge of reporting on generative AI and large language models. He's since become an expert on the products of generative AI models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google Gemini, and every other synthetic media tool. His experience runs the gamut of media, including print, digital, broadcast, and live events. Now, he's continuing to tell the stories people want and need to hear about the rapidly evolving AI space and its impact on their lives. Eric is based in New York City.
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