For one, I feel like it cheapens Christmas even more than it has been cheapened. It's already quite the battered ol' gal. If you spend any time in public, shopping at chain stores, or watching television in the U.S., you're probably already used to getting Christmas blared in your ears and flashed in your face with all its garish colors and mind-numbing advertising. I have no problem when stores acknowledge Christmas and the holidays and create a cheery atmosphere, but I dislike the fact that they push the starting line further and further into November (October, even). I don't like that they're trying to manipulate us all into feeling all Christmas-y and hoping that we'll spend more money. I'd rather choose for myself when Christmas starts, as opposed to having Wal-Mart tell me.
I also dislike the Christmas creep because it just makes the season last too long. As a child, Christmas took FOREVER to arrive. Christmas was a life event. We built paper chains in school and had little advent calendars just to count down 25 days, and those 25 days felt like a life-age. I can't imagine what suffering kids today must endure. They have to wait more than twice as long as I ever did!
As I've grown older, time has sped up. A month is no longer unbearably long. A month is nothing to me anymore. I measure my life in years, and even those seem to be going faster and faster. Is this why people have embraced the elongating of Christmas? Is it because they want it to last longer so they can be reminded of their own childhoods? If so, I believe the plan is flawed. This is because although December has become shorter, all the intervening months have also become shorter, too. If we spread Christmas out across two or three months, it's going to take up a disproportionate chunk of our lives and will eventually become a hazy blur of Victoria's Secret advertisements, crappy Santa Claus movies, and peppermint-flavored everything. Where's the magic in Christmas when you only have to wait six months for it to get all started up again? Summer doesn't even come around that often.
So no, corporations, I personally reject your starting of Christmas so freakin' early. In my youth, Christmas time started the day after Thanksgiving. In the past decade or so, it seems that this is no longer the case. This year, there were Christmas decorations being put up the day before Halloween. Many of my students informed me they saw Christmas decorations up mid-October.
Speaking of which, I also dislike the term "Black Friday" for its pretentiousness. This is supposed to be the day after Thanksgiving in which everyone goes out and shops and stores have their first Christmas sales. Black Friday conjures up images of witches and demons at black mass, or thousands of soldiers dying in a failed raid in World War II, or the name of a devastating terrorist attack or something. Actually, maybe the name is apt. Millions of people going to celebrate the birth of the Lord Jesus Christ by waking up before the dawn, huddling in masses in the bitter, freezing cold outside in front of horrible retail stores for hours on end, pushing and shoving one another in an orgy of spending while thousands of children are starving--all in an effort to save twenty dollars on a Nintendo Wii... Religion doesn't even inspire that kind of mass devotion.
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Anyway, enough bitter old-man hand wringing. I actually started this as a way to share holiday traditions, but I've gone off on a this rant... I'll be back with some nice happy writing about my favorite holiday rituals.
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