I have held back my pen for a week now.  I had to.  We had a guest blogger last week, the honorable Larry Latham, Esquire, of “Lovecraft is Missing” fame writing for you and it would have been rude of me to overshadow him and the entire week he deserves with the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad news I have to share with you. I am so relieved that I no longer have to hold back the horror that has been welling up inside of me now for over a week.
Whew. Brace yourselves.
Here goes.
There is Christmas music on the Radio. There is Christmas music on the radio and has been since at least Devil’s Night, the night before Halloween. It wasn’t even November before the music of midwinter began to play over the airwaves! We hadn’t even celebrated our favorite blatant pagan holdover before music for the celebration of the Mass of Christ was pumping out of speakers everywhere! Houses had yet to be torched in Detroit and I was listening to Rudolph the Rednose Reindeer!
What the heck happened?
I know that my entire life that businesses start to pimp Christmas the day after Thanksgiving, and that hurricane of Christmas themed consumerism and advertising will be shoved down our throats until the mere idea of thankfulness will be a distant memory. I even understand the gut wrenching idea that by getting people to think about Christmas shopping even longer that more stuff is gonna get sold. But there has to be a limit right?! We can’t start Christmas in June can we? And isn’t Halloween, the second biggest consumer holiday, enough to tide over the machine for a few weeks?
What really horrifies me is what is lost to our culture by this insane desire to make the most wonderful time of the year last for three fifths of the year. I mean where the heck did Fall go?! Has anyone else noticed this? Fall don’t exist anymore. Used to be the Fall was a time of the year that was special in and of itself because of what it alone had: golden crunchy leaves, crisp but not bitterly cold air, cloudy skies, warm sweaters and jackets but no coats, football, school being fully in swing but not yet appearing to have no end, and turkeys and pilgrims and indians on refrigerators across the country. If nothing else the Fall always gave us a reason to have to relearn how to spell Autumn.
But now the Fall has been lost to Christmas. Now we hear songs about walking in a winter wonderland before there is even frost on a pumpkin! It’s like Fall disappeared and now there is just an ever more impatient rush to get to December 25th so we can be painfully disappointed at Christmas’s inevitable failure to live up to our astronomical hopes!
The sad thing is that the real loser under this paradigm is Winter. See Christmas used to show up in the handful of days leading right to December 25th, the darkest and gloomiest time of the year, and it would stick around bringing celebration and cheer for about 12 days until you could see that Winter wouldn’t last forever and could be enjoyed again. But now Christmas is here from October 29th to December 25th, the day most people who have been Christmas-ing for two solid months are glad to be rid of lights and jingle bells and tinsel and Santa and all his helpers, leaving the bleakest and most wintry days of the New Year without a bit of cheer.
All to sell more stuff. Which, while a noble goal, I still say, “BAH! Humbug!” too.
At least now I have a BETTER reason to not buy anyone anything.

-Bob

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