significance of holidays

I just watched the movie "For your Consideration", which has Michael Guest and his entire usual crew and is quite hilarious at times. It's about a small film getting all this hype about possible Oscar nominations. The little movie that they are making though, is called "Home for Purim" and is about a southern american jewish family in world war 2 and a dying mother and tensions and sadness with her about her daughter, who she finds out is a lesbian. Anyway, I thought that the title and the emphasis that they place on Purim was super funny. According to my dad (who's jewish, although extremely reform) Purim is like the second least significant holiday on the Jewish calender next to sukkos. This got me to thinking about lots of other holidays that we sort of tend to pump up, commercialize, and overemphasize when they really aren't that important, or we change their meaning.
To start, lets stick with the Jewish theme we got going here. Chanukah is another one of those holidays (Purim was only made out to be a big deal in the movie... apparently only real hardcore orthodox jews celebrate it with the whole shebang and everything nowadays). Now don't get me wrong. Chanukah is a pretty significant holiday on their calender - the celebration of lights! - and maybe not as big as passover, or roshashona, but it's still big. But it's much bigger here in america now than it traditionally has been. And I think it's because of Christmas. Chanukah generally falls around the same time as christmas does, although it varies from year to year because the jewish calender is lunar based, but because it is within the holiday season it is made to be a bigger commercial holiday. For example, before, kids never really received presents every night of chanukah, but might get a little bit of gelt, or gold coins. Nowadays, thanks to commercialization and our capitalistic society, chanukah is like christmas for jews.
Then there's halloween. Once a pagan holiday, now halloween is an excuse to buy loads of candy. For children to dress up as their favorite character from tv, movies, or whatever, and for adults to spend tons of money on extravagant costumes for various parties. without candy companies and party stores, halloween would probably not be perverted if you will to what it is now. it would probably be a much more low key, religious holiday as it once was.
And an upcoming holiday is Easter. I'm sure that the holiday that is supposed to celebrate the resurrection was not intended to be focused on bunnies and eggs, and pastel colors and marshmellow and chocolate candies and dying eggs into pretty colors.