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Christmas arrives right on time: immediately after Halloween

Posted on Nov 10, 2009 in Opinion

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For me, Halloween went off without a hitch. This was pretty much my first year to hand out Halloween candy, having grown up in a very small neighborhood and getting more astray mental patients at my front door than kids asking for sweets.

So, my friends invited me over to help them move along the costumed tykes, but they soon asked me to leave when I decided to play a little trick of my own: I answered the door, greeted the kids with “Trick or Treat!” and then took their candy.

I kid, of course. I didn’t really take their candy, though I can’t help thinking most of them left feeling like I could have. Like I said, I was new to it.

And so we’re off — into the most celebrated, hyped and chaotic part of any year; a time when everything we have put our better efforts into the past ten months are suddenly shifted to the back burner, and we are more concentrated on finding the best turkey recipe, not to mention spending two hours on Amazon looking for that particular NASCAR tie on Uncle Bob’s wish list.

Perhaps it is a little too early to be writing an article about Christmas. Everyone always says, “Why are you talking about Christmas already? Let’s get through Thanksgiving first!” But come on, everyone knows Thanksgiving is just a brief stop Lincoln made for us on the way to Christmas because he couldn’t wait until late December to cut up a turkey.

Around this time of year, the threat of Christmas becomes readily apparent: radio stations switch to Holiday music formats, lighting extravaganzas are scheduled at all the retail outlets, Starbucks puts out their Christmas cups. And what consistently surprises me every year is that people complain about all this commotion, surprised to find it all going on way too early.

“Why are we talking about Christmas already? Let’s get through Thanksgiving first!”

It’s not that they’re not within their rights. Christmas does seem to come earlier every year, and most can’t understand the drive to bring on the figgy pudding before the Jack-o-Lantern’s even had a chance to rot, but the only thing one can count on more than the immediate roll-out of snowmen and candy canes after Halloween is the vast majority of folks who are confused by it. They’ve become a tradition unto themselves.

Of course, there’s an immediate answer to this confusion. It’s no secret that Christmas is monetarily driven.

Especially now more than ever, businesses bring out their Yuletide merchandise early to get a good start on the most financially beneficial holiday of them all. But consider something else: the last two months of the year are perhaps the most bizarre and stress inducing times we can face as human beings, and we need to be casually lulled and seduced into committing ourselves to them.

Think about it. What other time in our lives would we think to bring gigantic indigenous pine trees into our living rooms, or hang socks over the fireplace and put small gifts in them for our loved ones. When else would we actually welcome some anonymous stranger into our homes, insisting that he’s going to give us things rather than take them away?

These are not acts that we can just suddenly commit without any warning or slight coaxing. We need to slip slowly into that frame of mind, like tapping the water with our feet before jumping in.

Essentially, the snowflakes on our Starbucks cups and Bing Crosby tunes on our radios in early to mid-November serve as reminders. They remind us that we are now on a deadline; in addition to our already hectic lives, we are about to submit ourselves to various tasks and traditions that the holiday season cannot help but bring with it.

They remind us that we are now on a budget. Instead of considering our own needs, we must consider those of our immediate family and friends. Some of these things we need to buy take time to price and save up for, especially for folks like me, who are so cheap they have to ask the thrift store for layaway (rim shot, please).

Christmas is that most absurd of holidays, bringing with it a laundry list of tasks that must be completed to make one feel like it was celebrated justly. Over the course of the holidays — and sometimes in just one day — we reunite with family, give thanks, give gifts, overcook, undercook, spend way more time in traffic than we do any other time of the year, build fires, watch movies, watch football, and, if your family’s normal at all, quibble over tiny oddities that had been forgotten for the past year and, after New Year’s, will surely be forgotten though the next.

How can one not understand that it takes time to prepare for all this?

So I’m standing up for Starbucks and their Christmas cups released on November 1, and I’m standing up for Wal-Mart with their cheap plastic trees set front and center next to the discounted Halloween candy.

And, yes, I’m even standing up for the radio stations that, in the next week, will be rolling out their Holiday programming every weekend — that is, until late November, when they will go 24/7. See, they’re starting out slow, testing out the waters before they completely immerse themselves in them.

Email: diner822@yahoo.com




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