“What Have We Done To Xmas?”🎄

Black Friday started before Halloween this year. No longer the day after Thanksgiving, it’s a state-of-mind/marketing gimmick that has fully devoured “ ‘X’ shopping days until Xmas.” (Remember that? Quaint now, isn’t it?)  We no longer countdown to Xmas. 🎄 we hustle it on stage in October, and won’t let it go until it showers us with benisons.

The seasonal lights went up at the local mall sometime since Hallowe’en. That’s not unusual timing. What is unusual is that they used to stay dark until Black Friday, when there would be a “lightning ceremony” to promote the beginning of the Xmas shopping season. With no fanfare whatsoever, they lit up sometime last week. We can’t be bothered with preliminaries anymore. Besides, the “shopping season” starts in October now.

I’ve even seen inflated Xmas decorations on front lawns. That I can forgive. A) it’s probably new to the household this year; B) given the times, we can be forgiven for having to construct something upon which to rejoice. Blame it on our Puritan heritage. Xmas is the closest we as a society get to rejoicing.. Is it really any surprise we’re so hungry for it?

Still, we’ve turned our cultural seed corn into candy corn, and we’re rapidly devouring it. It’ll make us sick, 🤢 but we can’t help ourselves. I don’t even care about the “commercialism” anymore (another quaint term from a bygone era). But hammering everything special out of the season as it is to “airy thinness beat” the better to stretch over two months, and soon three, does not make the season golden; it’s not even brass. It’s more like tin. A dull-colored alloy, not something nearly pure.

And it increases our cultural race towards the future; the pell-mell plummet to a goal we never reach because when we do, we’re already disappointed and racing on to the next thing coming, expecting that to set everything aright. If we can finally just make the right purchases (policies; ideas; narratives; politicians; things) beforehand.

What have we done to…our culture?

In our neighborhood Halloween decorations (mostly giant skeletons) quickly morphed into Christmas ones by adding a red scarf to said skeletons! Not even a nod to the next holiday of Thanksgiving. sigh

Those giant skeletons are expensive! And hard to put up! Gotta get your money’s worth out of ‘em, huh? 😹💀