November
20, 2017
Greetings from
the new leaf,
Most of us can
tell that Thanksgiving is coming. There
are the usual clues; in some households there are primitive paper renderings of
turkeys stuck to the refrigerator, or perhaps food being prepared, particularly
things that are rarely eaten except on Thanksgiving. I’m thinking of anything with cranberries,
yams or pumpkin here.
The other way
you know that Thanksgiving is near is that many homes decorate for
Christmas. Wait, this is not what you
think it is.
For many
households the introduction of the Christmas season has been pushed back week
by week until in some places the tree goes up as soon as the Halloween candy is
eaten. For the more festive homes, the
process might begin a little sooner; like right after the Fourth of July
parade.
Associated
with this Christmas creep is the arrival of holiday music on the radio. ‘Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer’, the
Jingle Bell Dogs, along with all of your Christmas favorites, start playing as
soon as socially acceptable, the limits of which has been slowly pushed until ‘Feliz
Navidad’ could be heard after a Valentine’s Day promotion on KWOP, where they
play all the hits all the time with fewer commercial interruptions.
Loyal readers
(and you both know who you are) will already know that in years past I would
stand on my rickety soapbox to rail against the Christmas creep. I predicted that unless we resisted then
marketers and their unwitting partners would soon start decorating for
Christmas immediately after Christmas.
I’ll admit
that I may have provided more vitriol than what was called for, which was
none. No one asked me to save Christmas
from being absorbed into the Arbor Day celebrations. What’s going to be different this year is
this: I vow not to complain about Christmas creep.
If people want
to turn their homes into Gingerbread Houses on Labor Day, why should I
care? If it makes someone else happy to
sing along to ‘Oh Little Town of Bethlehem’ on President’s Day, who am I to
judge?
In some places
(check local listings) this is a practical issue. If you are going to put up outdoor Christmas décor
(twinkling lights, wreaths, bows, inflatable Santa, projections of holiday
scenes on your garage door, giant creche with life size camels, reindeer and
sleigh on the roof etc) then you have to get it done before it’s too cold or
the snow prevents it. Just because I
suffered frostbite slinging multicolored electrical icicles on the eves troughs
on December 20th doesn’t mean the rest of the world should.
The fact is no
one cares about what I think about all of this.
I think I’ve said enough on the subject so that my opinion is known to
people close to me, and frankly it has never produced change other than resentment
and Olympic Caliber eye rolling. I think
in my effort to express my ‘holier than your holy’ opinion I gave people the
wrong impression. I am not a Grinch, I
don’t have anything against Christmas, far from that. I got too distracted by traditions and lost
sight of what I really care about.
Even more
important, it dawned on me recently that my rants about radio stations that
play only Xmas songs from November to January and seeing Christmas lights
before Halloween, or whatever, was casting a pall on the enjoyment of the
season for other people.
So, with that
in mind I will shut up already. And
while I’m shutting up I’ll shut up. I’ll
eat a Shut Up sandwich. Open up a can of
Shut Up. You get it.
In other good
news, it’s possible that if I stop complaining about how other people celebrate
the season, it may allow a little more of that good cheer to seep into my own
life. Hard to argue that even from the
best of soapboxes.
Hope
this finds you with mistletoe on your mind,
David
Copyright
© 2017 David Smith
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