How to Block Premature Holiday Posts on Facebook
I think the first time this happened to me this year last weekend, in early November, at an IKEA store. As we rounded the last corner to the cash registers, my boyfriend and I came face to face with hundreds of artificial Christmas trees waiting to be purchased. Subsequently, I began to notice that Advent calendars and decorations are popping up almost everywhere I go, as well as mentions of the holidays in my social feeds.
Holidays seem to come earlier and earlier every year. While there is nothing you can do about trees and gift wrapping in stores, you can do something about getting bombarded with holiday paraphernalia too soon on the Internet thanks to a browser extension called Social Fixer .
We have written about Social Fixer several times already. CNET noted this week that it can be especially useful for filtering holiday content from your Facebook feed (it does a good job of getting rid of political posts as well).
To use it, simply install the Social Fixer extension, click it when 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 this word, the entire post will be hidden in your timeline, and the post that it was filtered stays in its place.
A few words to try: Christmas, Holidays, Gifts, Christmas, and if you want to give yourself a nice Facebook holiday from politics: Trump. The filter only works for words that are entered into messages (so images will still be displayed), but it does a pretty good job with them.
After you have listed all the words you would not like to see messages about, click the “Save Changes” button and check out Facebook Holiday-free.
If and when you really want to get into the spirit of the holiday, you can delete the words you specified by going to the same menu and removing all those keywords.