I think the first time it happened to me this year was last weekend, the beginning of November, in an IKEA. When we rounded that final corner to the cash registers, my boyfriend and I came face to face with hundreds of artificial Christmas trees waiting to be bought. Afterwards, I started noticing advent calendars and ornaments popping up almost everywhere I go, along with mentions of the holidays in my social feeds.
The Holidays seems to come earlier and earlier every year. While you can’t do anything about bumping into trees and gift wrap at stores, you can do something about getting bombarded with Holiday paraphernalia too early on the internet thanks to a browser extension called Social Fixer.
We’ve written about Social Fixer a few times before. This week CNET pointed out that it can come particularly in handy for filtering holiday content out of your Facebook feed (it also does a good job of getting rid of political posts).
To use it, simply install the Social Fixer extension, click on it while you have Facebook open, and then click Options. From there you can add a list of words you don’t want to see. Whenever a post contains that word, the whole post will be hidden on your timeline and a message letting you know it has been filtered will be left in its place.
Some words worth trying: Christmas, Holidays, presents, Xmas, and if you want to give yourself a nice Facebook holiday from politics: Trump.The filter only works for words that are typed into posts (so images will still show up), but it does a decent job of handling those.
Once you’ve listed all the words you’d rather not see posts about, hit the Save Changes button and browse Facebook Holiday-free.
If and when you do want to get into the Holiday spirit, you can delete the words you’ve listed by going into the same menu and clearing out all those keywords.
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