I was in the mall with a friend and saw Santa had just arrived that day. We just finished a late Halloween, and already the jolly old man is taking children’s early toy orders.
This whole thing has gone a bit too far.
Does anybody remember Hess’ department store, based in Allentown, PA? Each year, usually after Thanksgiving, a local network would air a special featuring the store’s animatronic holiday figures. It was something to look forward to. All the major department stores opened up a holiday window the day after Thanksgiving. Black Friday meant something back then.
Hess’ was one of the early victims of department store closures. Back then, probably nobody would have predicted that such places would go out of business like they have in the past twenty years.
Now department stores compete for which can open closest to the end of the turkey dinner, while the stuffed denizens of the family table have not succumbed to the effects of tryptophan.
The PA lottery is airing their holiday instant ticket commercials already, featuring a group a carolers doing a lottery themed rendition of “Twelve Days of Christmas” (the lead singer has sung “Five Cash Five”–substituting for five gold rings–for about four years now, and the residual checks must be phenominal), and a man graciously giving tickets as gifts to the employees as a newsstand (from which he might well purchase them daily anyway).
We see ads for the “Pre-Black Friday Sale,” and prices are low enough that one could refurbish an entire home with new stuff.
Of course, there are victims of Hurricane Sandy who need an entire new home, and even sales won’t help them recover in time for Christmas.
Some of the networks are already airing holiday themed specials. Next will come the radio stations playing holiday music until January. Christmas has become a calendar equivalent of a plague of locusts, which comes and ravages your life for what seems like forever, and for which you are grateful only when it is finally over.
Sure, businesses are desperate for end-of-year profits, and some people like to have a holiday that lasts forever, but the constant barrage so early in the season is just wrong.
Can’t we at least get to Thanksgiving week first?
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