If I didn’t know any better, I’d swear the Halloween costume shops pulled up stakes and disappeared at 12:01 the morning of November 1st, and in their places are Christmas shops. Already!
It’s bad enough that the card shops start peddling ornaments in July, and that gaily packaged holiday junk food starts appearing on little green or red tablecloth covered round display tables in Macy’s by mid-September. Now the stores are engaging in early sales hoping to gain revenue even before the Black Friday madhouse begins.
Really, can pre-packaged stuffing in a bag produced in October still be worth eating in late November? If so, it must have been preserved using methods taught in ancient Egyptian tombs. Perhaps we should already have figured this out, since it comes at the same time as the first batches of fruitcake, which everybody knows was found, still edible, in a burial vault in the Valley of the Kings.
The food is just part of the insanity. Your local pharmacy should be well stocked by now with tons of cheap stocking-stuffers which would have made our founding fathers faint. Do we really need a dispenser, shaped like a reindeer, that “poops” brown jelly beans?
Nativity scenes start showing up in garden shops, next to the holiday villages from some joint called Department 57. I guess that name is based on a classification in some manual called the Department Store Code Book of Merchandise Sorting or something. I don’t buy miniature villages, mostly because the people in the scenes are never proportioned to the size of the buildings. I realize their size is required by a safety law meant to prevent small children from choking on Mr. Ice Skater from the magnetic pond feature, but can’t they just make the buildings larger?
I don’t buy nativity scenes because I just don’t ever see one I like. They’re always too modernistic or Renaissance-y or nondescript. Besides, Baby Jesus always winds up getting lost for some inexplicable reason, even from supersize nativities in front of houses of worship. Maybe folks who display them could put an appropriate lightbulb in the crèche and keep the infant savior secured in the vault instead.
By the time I have my first bite of turkey, I’ll be tired of the pre-holiday sales. I’ll also have a sore back from hauling all the Black Friday newspaper inserts out to the curb for pickup on trash day.
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