WAG - It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year
(Now Starting in October)
It's that time of season again.
No, not the time of year when you are woken up in the night and open your door surprising a person, who you’d earlier warned to be quiet, who was in the process of writing an obscene message on your door and is still clutching your dry erase marker while they stare at you with a dumbstruck look on their face.
Well… yes, that did happen earlier today, but that’s not what I’m focusing on.
I’m talking about the Christmas spirit being in the air.
I’m not sure whether it’s due to the dip in temperatures or Wal-Mart (home of the underpaid migrant workers) rolling out the Yuletide stock even before October was finished, but it’s beginning to manifest itself earlier this year.
I think it’s due to the fact Thanksgiving isn’t a very involved holiday. Other than preparing and cleaning the meal or eating and digesting the meal, depending on what stereotyped group you belong to, there isn’t much to do.
You don’t put up strings of cranberry lights. You don’t hang little turkeys on trees. You don’t sing Pilgrim Carols. People don’t dress up as Squanto stand next to a donations bucket ringing a bell for several hours.
Once you move outside the kitchen and dining room, there isn’t much to do. You can watch televised parades (let the big cities have their own parades. We “quaint,” and “simple” folk will enjoy our warm homes while you city dwellers slowly develop frostbite in the shade of a 98-foot tall corporate mascot balloon) and football. You can turn your back on conventional wisdom about it being the biggest shopping day of the year and spend 5 minutes shopping and 2 hours standing in checkout lines for every store you visit. You can also spend hours plotting your return route along the congested roads on one of the most heavily traveled days of the year.
There are so many traditions or watermarks to forge, it’s amazing that more people don’t go insane. But that’s the saving grace of the approaching Christmas season; it gives us hope and something to look forward to.
Already I know people who are putting up little Christmas decorations. People at church were talking about putting up their lights this week. Lord knows after Thanksgiving break rooms will take on a more festive look, but even now the transition is moving away from scarecrows and werewolves and more toward shepherds and wise men.
Personally, I’m focusing on music right now. I’ve already started to play Christmas music. I plan to put up snowflake decals, replacing the back to school decals that have languished on the glass since August.
I just wish I knew why it had to come so early. Not the feelings of good cheer and best wishes, but the unabashed commercial overkill. I know it seems to get earlier every year, but you’d think one could pass a law where you had to wait for the week of Thanksgiving before peddling X-mass (the celebration of consumers, not the Christian holiday).
Winter-themed items would still be allowed, as of November 1st, as would soft sell Christmas orientated items, but otherwise there should be a ban.
The law would never get past committee, but it’s fun to image the revving up to Christmas involving more carols and less “blowout sales.”
In the meantime, I guess I’ll raise a glass (of orange soda) to the dearly oppressed native Americans, begin the mental preparation for braving the discount hungry shopping hordes, and play Weird Al Yankovic’s “Christmas at Ground Zero” to get in the mood.
“Hey! Isn’t it too early to be playing that kind of music?”
“Nope. It’s November, isn’t it?”
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