Christmas Creep

"When I was a kid, Halloween was Halloween, and Santa wasn't poking his ASS into it! Thanksgiving used to be Thanksgiving, and it was its own holiday, not 'Christmas: Part One'. When I was a kid, you ate, and you drank, and you passed out, and nobody woke you up and said 'let's go shopping.'"
-Lewis Black

It's an ongoing phenomenon, and it gets worse every year - Christmas muscling in on the calendar before it's time. I know it's the biggest holiday of the year, the final celebration of the previous twelve months, a day for family and friends and snow and presents and traditions and love. That's all wonderful. But it's too damn early for that. I love Christmas, I really do, but I don't start to warm up to it until either the day after Thanksgiving or the first of December. Or a murky area between those two days. Notice how this blog doesn't have a winter theme yet.

There are a lot of things that make me get into the Christmas spirit. Shopping and holiday music are two of those things. But no matter how early the stores try to force those, what they can't do is make December and the first permanent snowfall come faster - and without those, it's not truly the holiday season for me. I especially don't appreciate the shoving aside of Halloween in the final weeks leading up to it. Nobody wants Frosty in October. I for one am still much more interested in spiders, skeletons, and jack-o-lanterns at that time.

One of the most hilarious examples of Christmas Creep I know of is something I ran into just recently. It seems that not only are Christmas cards being sold, but so too are belated Christmas cards. I found the concept of seeing a card for sale in November that read "Can't believe Christmas is over..." on the front to be the funniest thing I'd seen all day. Maybe eventually we'll just have a year-round push to buy for Christmas.

In any case, I don't need a snow-and-elf motif to tell me when to start my holiday shopping - I keep an eye out all year for interesting items to give at Christmas, especially if they're on sale. Both this year and last year, I'm going to include an item I bought at an early summer yard sale as one of my presents. I suggest the same to anyone else - as long as it's not some huge thing you can't hide for long, buy your Christmas gifts ahead of time if you can. That item may not still be available come November!