It's beginning to look a lot like...oh, for pete's sake.

[cadhla]

So yesterday, my mother drove me to the grocery store, since my back is currently out and that severely limits my capacity for carrying large quantities of anything, including food. I was totally out of everything, including peas, soda, bread, pickles, and random chunks of dead bird to be thrown into the oven and roasted. Her intervention was

Comments

[autographedcat]

You get to hold off until Black Friday before you coat the stores in your winter retail wonderland. Because seriously, you're killing the magic. It used to be exciting and awesome when the Christmas decorations went up. Now it's just sort of preemptively exhausting.

Yes. This precisely.

*gentle hugs*

[ravenclawed]

At one point, JC Penney was sending out its Christmas catalog the last week of August.

It's insane, I agree. The only thing I like about seeing all of this Christmas stuff now is that my mother is no longer saying, "I hate Halloween." I love my mother but I swear, a solid month and a half of that is enough to drive anyone batty.

[tikiera]

Halloween is my favorite holiday. Christmas Eve is my second.

And I really, really wish I could boycott stores that put the decorations out two months in advance.

But I can't. Or else I couldn't shop. Glah.

It does kind of make the holiday anticlimatic when it's been around for two months.

[banjoplayinnerd]

Yeah, it's a bit hard to boycott stores that put out Christmas decorations a week before Halloween. But IMO there are two things you can do:

1. Make a note of who is putting up Christmas decorations before Thanksgiving and send the store manager (and if it's a chain, the chain's CEO and/or marketing department) a polite letter explaining that, even if they think they are trying to get people in the holiday spirit early, they are instead killing it by spreading it out so thin.

2. Refuse to spend anything on Christmas-specific items before the day after Thanksgiving. If enough people did that maybe retailers would get the hint. (IMO those culture warriors who make hay out of a supposed "war on Christmas" should maybe have a "war on spreading Christmas out toward Labor Day" instead.)

[bercilakslady]

I think holiday themes in stores should be restricted to the month of that holiday, with the possible exception of July 4, because it's so early in the month. Given that I don't celebrate Halloween or Christmas, having August through the end of December be full of one or the other is just wearying.

[banjoplayinnerd]

I'm OK with Christmas decorations going up the day after Thanksgiving, because that's sort of traditional. The Macy's parade and all that. But any farther than that is just too much.

[twfarlan]

Part of me quietly wishes that Halloween lasted all year long. Maybe not Samhain, specifically, or the "reason for the season," but the spirit of the night where we can all either wear the mask of what we wish we could be... or take off all the metaphorical masks and really be ourselves... and have it be "okay."

Also candy.

Then again, there are places I could settle down to live where that attitude is more pervasive, I suppose. Also, you're not wrong about the special atmosphere being ruined if it lasts forever.

But also candy, so y'know.