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What Gen Z Got for Christmas in 2023

afterschool.substack.com · 93 words · saved by 1 readers

As is After School tradition, I spent many, many hours over the last few days watching hundreds (thousands?) of TikTok Christmas hauls — which, for those who are unfamiliar, are videos in which young people recount all of the gifts they received for the holiday — then I tallied up the most popular gifts. As I mentioned last year, my analysis here is more qual than quant, and the TikTok algorithm tends to prioritize a certain kind of person (pretty, thin, white, rich-girl hair, shiny manicures) no matter how much you swipe, so this is by no means representative of Gen Z in its entirety. I don’t have any hard data to back this up, but it really does seem like there are a lot more hauls this year. They started appearing in my feed a few days before Christmas and they’re still coming — every time I open the app, there’s a flurry of new hauls to sift through. (Thank you, Santa!) On one hand, this is inevitable. As TikTok’s monthly active users continue to grow — especially young users — it

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