Well, not actually pitting Christmas, which is a single day towards the end of December which I have been known to quite enjoy.
No, what I am pitting is the encroachment of Christmas on the rest of the year. Here it is, November 25 (not even the same month, people), and yet I am inundated with Christmas related advertising, decorations, exterior lights (and just to expand on that one, many city ordnances would never let you paint your house fluorescent pink and green and get away with it, due to it being “unsightly” or “inconsistent with the neighbourhood” - why then, can you light it up at night like this, as early as you please? Maybe it’s just me, but I’m not a big fan of my neighbourhood looking like Mardi Gras in October…), Christmas music on the radio, and images of that damned fat man in the red suit everywhere I look. Please don’t get me wrong - I’m not against Christmas. I just don’t think that the collective societal mood should be dictated by the next upcoming statutory holiday.
Give it a rest, people. Christmas is on December 25, not November-ish through the beginning of January.
The earliest I saw signs of Christmas was mid-September (Walgreens Drug Store). A friend of mine recently reported that she saw her first Christmas sighting in mid-August.
Nah. I’m willing to bet it’d just send them into worse spasms of moaning about how they depend on sales during that time, and trying to start the promotional season even earlier. Last year there were news reports about the disappointing sales so far that season, but if you read behind the headline, you saw that the stores were whining that the increase in sales over the previous year wasn’t as high as they’d liked.
Bingo.
And then suddenly we’ll have ‘Christmas in July’ sales annually, held by all retailers instead of a select few cottage industries. You can tell how bad the economy is by how early Christmas ads start. One of my local news stations here ran a story on how so many radio stations were switching to Christmas music under threat of less advertising dollars from retailers. The advertisers felt that shoppers would be put in the spending mood if they were bombarded with appropriate music.
Bah humbug. I buy whatever I’m going to buy well before Black Friday.
I’ll pit Christmas. No sir, I don’t like it. Forced hyper-consumerism and forced cheer and good will. If I were king, I’d make Christmas like the Olympics: once every four years.
I hate this. Everywhere I go I see nothing but Christmas stuff. I can’t even run normal every day errands without being surrounded by Santa and tinsel. By the week of Christmas I’ll be so sick of it I won’t be able to wait to get it over with. It was worse when I worked retail.
I hated it more when I worked retail and started having to listen to the shitty XMas music around now. Now I just settle for despise instead of “fiery hatred of a thousand hells.”
Currently, I am working for an advertising company that does a local publication. I’ve been dealing with Christmas stuff since the last week in October, when I started calling people on the holiday calendar. I was sick of Halloween (and, by extension, Samhain) long before October 31st.
What bothers me is that I can’t find any fucking Thanksgiving decorations! Where are the cornucopias? Where are the turkeys with the accordion fold-out bodies? Where are the Pilgrim people? Wait, is that it: Thanksgiving decorations are now un-PC, because people will be offended by the sight of happy, smiling Native American sharing turkey and pie with Pilgrims? Or is it just that Thanksgiving doesn’t perform well in the white-male-age-18-to-49 demo?
Oh, and I work retail, but I have no problem with Christmas music. Christmas music is supposed to be palatable, and to me it is. Much preferable to the top-40 dreck I otherwise have to listen to, that sticks in my head all day. I hope they put me in the Christmas store a lot this season; I can deal with Burl Ives singing “Silver and Gold” and Bing Crosby asking “Do You Hear What I Hear?”, but spare me the 42,837th repetition of “Genie in a Bottle”.
I remember one of my first Christmases in Japan, the main department store in front of the train station not only waited until mid-December to put up any Christmas decorations, they had workmen taking them down again at 9pm on Christmas day.
I think that’s it. Beyond the food, some accordion-fold turkeys and cornicopias, a few Pilgrim candles and the odd gourd or ear of Indian corn, Thanksgiving just doesn’t sell. Not like the all-out, full-court press Griswoldesque outdoor decorating extravaganza that has become a virtual requirement in some neighborhoods, the pressure to buy the perfect gift for everyone you’ve ever said hello to, the tree in every room and a full stocking for every living creature in the household, not to mention the millions of Christmas craft packages sold every year, approximately one percent of which will ever be completed… now that puts money in the cash register.
But poor Thanksgiving? They can’t make us spend any more money on it, so they’ll do their damndest to demote it to nothing more than a landmark in the Great Christmas Shopping Season.
