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Tis not the season yet

Today marks exactly one month until Christmas Day. Thankfully, it will all be over soon.

For well over a month, hints of Christmas-related decorations, advertisements and music have invaded my life like some sort of demonic possession. The phenomenon known as Christmas creep has arrived — when businesses and over-zealous shoppers move up the start of the holiday season.

There was a time in my life when I approached the holidays with great anticipation — but I was six. Since that time, I would like to think I have aged and matured, recognizing my quarter-year obsession with Christmas was a stage to be grown out of. Unfortunately the rest of the Western world thinks otherwise.

Of course such an approach is understandable. The holiday season represents one of the largest opportunities for businesses to shore up their profits before the end of the year. The advertising executives who manage to find a way to extend the shopping orgy of Christmas well into August will have statues built in their likenesses at the entrance to every Wal-Mart and shopping centre across North America.

So of course we now spend more time preparing for the Christmas season than we do actually celebrating it.

Back when I worked in retail, we would normally receive our Christmas stock by Labour Day. Does anyone question the sanity of such a practice? What has turned into an annual rant on my part is met with indifference on the part of my peers.

“What’s so bad about Christmas coming early?” they ask.

Well to start, there’s the issue of Christmas music. Shoppers will note that the majority of grocery stores around London have started piping out Christmas tunes 24/7. I’m not sure exactly who is to blame for such a practice, but I am confident there is a very special level of hell reserved for their eternal punishment. One can only hear Mannheim Steamroller synthesize their way through “Deck the Halls” so many times before their will to live totally evaporates.

The banality extends beyond music, too. Christmas creep gives us the dubious joys of seeing dancing Santas and singing Christmas trees wherever we go for well over a month. These evil creations still persist as popular decorations, though they likely terrorize all toddlers to the point of pants wetting.

But the abundance of festive tunes and weird decorations are far from the worst part of Christmas creep.

No, the worst part of this phenomenon is how it totally overshadows how special the holiday can actually be. Though retailers selfishly hope to extend the Christmas season in order to boost their profits, they fail to recognize how the practice undermines the holiday.

There was a time when Christmas was an event to look forward to for an entire year. Knowing the holiday season would only last a scant couple of weeks meant savouring every moment of it.

Instead, we now have a society where we feel everything must be available all of the time, where waiting for something is seen as a fatal flaw. Part of the joy of Christmas comes from the knowledge that it only happens once a year. But by making it last for three months, is it really all that special anymore?

Bah, humbug.

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