I just saw my first Christmas-present ad of the season!

An ad for the Febreeze ScentStories gadget. Wrapped up in red ribbon, with lovely tinkly Christmas music playing in the background. Makes a lovely holiday gift, they say!

Damn, isn’t it the accepted custom to wait until at least Halloween before pummeling us with the Christmas ads?

Leave me alone. I don’t want to have to start my bah-humbugging this early, it’s exhausting!

I’ve seen Christmas decorations going up in a few shops this week. The Labour Day weekend (first Monday in October) now seems to be the signal for the start of the Christmas onslaught.

I saw my first ad for some sort of Christmas sale for a furniture store on tv before I fell asleep earlier. They had the usual festive Christmas music playing in the background, while some loudmouth chick that pronounces ‘Furniture Gallery’ as ‘Furcher Gowry’ telling all about the great and wonderful discounts they have for our shopping pleasure.
The stores have the Christmas decorations out already, right alongside the Halloween stuff.

At the store where I work, we had our first customer upset over the scarcity of The Year’s Big Christmas Toy (the new Elmo, of course).

The Christmas Season has begun! Ding dong! Ding dong!

They had Christmas wrapping paper in the Dollar store the other day.

Bleh, I hate buying gifts.

At my local Payless supermarket, there’s a Christmas display already – an inflatable carousel with a polar bear, reindeer, some other (presumably Arctic) animal, and a penguin (only 180 or so degrees of latitude removed from home) as the “steeds”. However, Halloween isn’t being forgotten – there’s not only a skeleton sitting in an inflatable snow globe, but some giant air-filled gravestones as well.