Opinion: Christmas Needs to Know It’s Place

Miles Liss, Contributor|November 20, 2019

Christmas is a festive time of year to see your friends and family and exchange gifts. It’s a tradition that envelops most of the winter, and for many it brings life and excitement into one of the coldest, greyest months of the year. Of course, Christmas is an absolutely magical time of year for children, when old Saint Nick brings them candy and presents.

For companies, however, when the weather gets cold and the snow begins to fall, their eyes fill with money signs. Christmas is the most profitable holiday and they know it. This has lead to the Christmas season arriving earlier and earlier every year. In my opinion, this is an egregious abuse of the holiday season.

Christmas is forgetting its place, which leads many to feel Christmas anxiety rather than Christmas spirit. It’s only November 8th, and a majority of the ads we see on TV and online are already beginning to shift to be Christmas themed. I walked into a crafts store in the middle of Halloween to buy supplies for a costume, and a fourth of the department was already dedicated to Christmas decorations, three and a half whole months before Christmas. This is too early.

This isn’t just me being a grump; I asked the people to reaffirm my opinion too. I asked “In your opinion, when does the Christmas season begin?” and received a number of answers, all of which placed the Christmas season well after the advertising campaigns begin. Here were the most popular answers:

-after Black Friday (x3)

-December 15th

-The day after Thanksgiving (x4)

-The day after Halloween

This query was very informative for me. I’m not the biggest fan of Christmas anyway, but I believe that it’s acceptable to celebrate Christmas after Thanksgiving. I think that’s reasonable. So do the people I spoke to. As with any study, there are outliers. Mine was the person who said, “The day after Halloween.” They are wrong, and are most likely being paid to say that.

Music is another realm in which people are harassed during the Christmas season. Christmas music is one of the worst genres that exists, and my eardrums might just explode the next time I walk into King Soopers and have to listen to “All I want for Christmas is you.” There is zero innovation in the Christmas genre and the market is dominated by only a handful of songs that we actually associate with Christmas, which are repeated year after year after year. It’s a bold statement to even call Christmas music a genre.

Don’t get me wrong, I like Christmas as much as the next guy. I like the family time, the gift giving, the decorations, even some of the movies. But corporate greed is inflating Christmas beyond what is reasonable and beyond what people want. I fear for the safety of Halloween and Thanksgiving in these coming years, as the beginning of Christmas is pushed back into late fall. Whatever you feel about Christmas, October is spooky season, and November is turkey season. That’s how it should be.