Kelly Seiver
The Signal
For every thing there is a season, but it seems today there is no separation between one season and the next. This issue isn’t anything we haven’t heard already, but the winter holiday season seems to come earlier and earlier every year.
Not having a point where it is too early or too late to start decorating or celebrating a season is getting to a ridiculous point. Christmas decorations seem to span from Columbus Day to Ground Hog Day.
Decorating for the holidays for what I consider to be an inappropriate length of time is a pet peeve I know I share with many other people. In my opinion, it cheapens the holiday of Christmas as well as the holidays that surround it.
I first started noticing Christmas decorations for sale in stores such as Garden Ridge and Hobby Lobby in August this year, of course not in the larger quantities we see upon entering the second half of November, but still early. The official start of autumn this year wasn’t until Aug. 23., yet I saw Christmas decorations out the second week of August.
The managers of theses stores get very defensive, by the way, when questioned about such an early display of holiday spirit. One responded by saying, “well we just really like Christmas and it takes time to put out all of the decorations.” Okay, but four months seems an illogical amount of time to stock a few shelves.
Thanksgiving seems to be completely taken out of consideration in recent years. Although there are not as many decorations for Thanksgiving as there are for Christmas or Halloween, it is still an important national holiday and deserves to be recognized. In 1863, Abraham Lincoln gave the Thanksgiving Proclamation that made Thanksgiving a national holiday. The first national Thanksgiving observance was signed by George Washington in October of 1789. The decree appointed the day “to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God,” yet often we seem to skip right over it.
The day after Thanksgiving has traditionally marked the start of the Christmas season and is historically one of the busiest shopping days of the year. For three years Franklin Roosevelt tried to change the day we celebrate Thanksgiving to the third Thursday of the month to allow for more Christmas shopping days. Congress voted down the idea in 1941, but somehow Christmas still manges to upstage not only Thanksgiving, but Halloween, Veteran’s Day, Labor Day and the Fourth of July (Christmas in July).
This oversaturation of the Christmas holidays seems to me to be at cross – purposes if the intent is for stores and manufactures to make more money. When the availability is always there for consumers, the urge for impulse buying is much lower. In the past, when a shopper saw a seasonal item, they would buy for fear of it being sold out in the near future. Presently, it actually benefits the consumer if they wait until the appropriate time to decorate; it is likely they can get many of their desired items for clearance prices.
How I missed the old days, where everything was not readily available all year long. As a child I remember looking forward to having such items as peppermint bark, Halloween Oreos and Cadbury Bunny eggs as a treat to celebrate a special time of yet. Those were things I looked forward to all year long, but now they have lost some of their cache. Sunny 99.1 plays Christmas music typically a few days before Thanksgiving until the first week in January. I love Christmas music as much as the next person, but even I can only hear, “I want a Hippopotamus for Christmas” so many times.
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