With Christmas right around the corner, it’s time to start hanging up lights, getting trees, singing Christmas carols, and wrapping gifts. It truly is the most wonderful time of the year.
Unfortunately, for many this process started months ago. It’s all too common to hear and see Christmas festivities starting as early as mid-October. It’s great to see people possessed by the holiday spirit, but by spreading out the holiday, are we diluting its magic?
Yes.
No rhetorical questions here, it’s almost inarguable at this point. By the time Christmas rolls around, much of the excitement just turns to exhaustion. By spreading out the holiday, we’re making the day itself less fun.
Even if you hate Halloween, one must admit Christmas gets a bit tiring. The amount of work that goes into Christmas, the parties, the trees, the gifts, wears people out, and prolonging that exhaustion isn’t healthy. People spend literal months setting up lights so their displays can wow crowds, and the results are certainly impressive, but that quantity of work for about a month of payoff is disheartening.
This expansion of Christmas has started to encroach on Thanksgiving, and sometimes even Halloween. These other holidays represent a core set of traditions for many. Cutting into them for the sake of more caroling not only makes Christmas more watered down, it makes the other holidays less fun.
It’s hard to Halloween shop when the entire store is already being taken over by Christmas trees and colorful lights. The spookiness gets diminished by all the red and green. The pervasiveness of Christmas during the autumn months is damaging other traditions, and diluting the phenomenal Halloween candy pool with the middling Christmas alternatives.
The Grinches and Scrooges of the world would certainly be ecstatic to shorten the Christmas season, but the rest of us should take their word on this one, not to decrease the joy of Christmas, but to purify and refine it. So even if you’re the jolliest decorator around or an absolute Christmas superfan, maybe save the Mariah Carey for December 1st?
