I can't claim to partake in this pastime... but I am sure there are people here who do... Whether it be Christmas lights last week (Christmas was only last week wasn't it?), to celebrating their sporting team scoring, to playful tricks imposed on those who live in the same automated house... I'm sure there are more fun things people have done... Feel free to share....
You nailed it....usually Christmas fun uses. At one point I was announcing a variable array of short love note messages throughout the house to my wife when she would arrive. She got tired of that pretty quickly. 
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You must be overdoing it in person.... 
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Says the single man.... 
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Non HE related, using a routine so Alexa will play the first 45 seconds of Billy Joel - Piano Man at 9pm on Saturday nights. Usually home and in that area just often enough to forget about it until it starts playing.
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Downstairs Alexa........Alexa..goodnight..................reply....................Goodnight and don't forget to close the bedroom door, I don't want to listen to you farting all night
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Sounds like a practical measure...
If not for fun....
How can HA be used to increase peoples interaction with the natural world, whether it be when it can add to the human experience.... or.... well encouraging anything more than staying inside....
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I still feel like we need a Command and Conquer style notification
Lmao!! Thanks, I needed a good chuckle this morning
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Weekly I have Siri (from one of my HomePods) tell Alexa "no more by the way." It keeps Alexa from spouting off stupid recommendations. I assumed Siri was annoyed by them as I was.
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Probably a good call to have a seperate ecosystem do this like you did, but for anyone without the option, I've had success with doing this within an Alexa routine all it's own.
Time trigger nightly
Set Volume to 0
Custom action: "Alexa, stop by the way"
I haven't heard her trying to be "helpful" in weeks, so, so far so good.
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I definitely make use of Christmas-related routines. Obvious ones like turning on/off the lights/inflatables/other decorations based on time (and sunset). I also have it turn off inflatables if it gets too windy.
Similar routine for Halloween but not worrying about the wind for those. There has been some debate about triggering things with motion sensors but this has not happened yet.
For every holiday/special days EXCEPT Christmas, we have Gardenspots set up outside the house to splash the exterior with some color. Those are set to come on almost all mornings for a while (until Sunrise) and for many holidays in the evening as well. Christmas is excluded due to the level of lighting already on the house and yard.
In addition there are some extra decorations for other holidays that are set to come on. The kids also use some lights when they are listening to music (Google voice command relayed through Hubitat to turn on the various systems).
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My best "for the fun of it" automation is having my under-cabinet lights displaying tomorrow's weather at 9:45pm every night. Blue=rain, purple=snow, yellow=sun. That was an automation really early on in my Smartthings journey that I couldn't let go when I made the jump to Hubitat.
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similar to my color cast weather port to hubitat.. I have it set to flash lights once with motion when there is rain or snow etc. and flash 3 times when there is an actual alert.. i have the colors set for
white=snow, blue = cold temp alert, yellow=wind, red=heat alert, pink=freezing rain , purple = rain.
i also had to modify it, i remember, to work on openweather as it was originally written for darksky i believe.
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