Is this where we’re headed?
I used to think this was a joke; something that hippies and old ladies complain about. “Christmas is getting here earlier every year”. “Yeah, right”, I’d say. “Thanksgiving is still Thanksgiving, and Christmas season doesn’t start until after that, on Black Friday when all the parents of the spoiled children rush to the malls and toystores at five in the morning to fight over a tickle-me-elmo doll.”
That was, of course, until three pieces of information got to me this year. Firstly, last Saturday, November 12th, while visiting Ithaca College, I saw an ad that TBS was running. The Grinch was on, telling us all about how he was going to steal Christmas. This is the old animated Grinch, not the crappy, overhyped, overproduced, overgrossing Jim Carrey atrocity. This was the classic cartoon that gets played every year; as much a part of Christmas as the 24-hour marathon of “A Christmas Story” is. Except one thing. They were advertising it because it was airing the next day. That’s right. November freakin 13th marks the official first day of the Christmas television season this year. A full twelve days before shopping season gets into full swing. Of course, this is not to say that Christmas specials have never aired this early. Rudolph and Frosty, etc. usually air around the 7th of December, but that’s forgiveable. Those actually air in the same month as Christmas, without another major holiday between the two. There used to be a time when there actually were Thanksgiving specials (hard to believe, I know). The one I remember had something to do with a bear in a pilgrim suit becoming friends with some other animal (maybe a duck?) dressed as an Indian, and I seem to remember it airing every year. Of course, it could all be a dream, or something I made up because I can’t find it after numerous internet searches.
Secondly: A few days later, I heard a radio ad for the Palmer Park Mall. I’m not sure exactly where that is (Maybe Jersey?). The main focus of the ad was that Santa was coming. HOORAY. Santa’s going to ride in on a fire engine on Thanksgiving day, signifying the coming of the Christmas shopping bonanza. WRONG! Santa is now coming to the mall on the totally arbitrary Saturday the 19th of November…. BEFORE THANKSGIVING! What’s the point? An extra four days to see Santa? Was there really that much of a demand to see Santa last year that kids didn’t get to see him because of time constraints? Are the kids really ready to see Santa this early in the year? I don’t mean to sound paranoid here, but is there some sort of Santa war going on between malls where they’re trying to get there earlier than the next guy to draw more business? Freakin Santa!
Thirdly, while at Redners, pushing the cart for the website’s egomaniacal slavemaster, we were looking near the candy department, by the WALL OF VALUES. And we noticed sweet little hershey candy, wrapped in yuletide colors. Awww, how nice. Green and Red kisses, green and red Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Green and Red Rollos, you get the idea. Really decorative and sweet for your holiday. Except… IT WAS FREAKIN OCTOBER 25th (or thereabouts). This is time to be selling Halloween candy. Pumpkins, and witches, and ghosts, not Christmas trees. I guess the idea is that you can get your Christmas candy early and let it sit in your dish, counting down the days. The one thing that doesn’t cross your mind while waiting for this candy to be in season is that it loses freshness and by the time it actually is December, that candy is more than likely going to break your teeth when you bite into it. The only other reason that I can suggest for the candy being there is that maybe… just maybe, Redners didn’t sell it the year before, which would explain why it was sitting on the WALL OF VALUES!
My point is this: we need to slow down. The earlier we start celebrating Christmas, the sooner we run out of material, and we’re forced to create four additional Charlie Brown specials, or watch Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey look as though they’re having seisures while singing carols, or I don’t know, watch “It’s a Wonderful Life” all four times that NBC shows it. We’ll be celebrating in September soon enough, and then my birthday will become engulfed in the massive Holiday that’s enveloped the rest of the fourth quarter of the year. And that’s the real shame of it all. Let’s not let that happen. For the children.
I forgot one thing. Sunny 104.5 in Philly is now playing all holiday music. They started last week (November 15th about). With over a month of this stuff, you’d think your head would explode.
The Myth of the Christmas Season Starting Earlier and Earlier gets four stars as it seems to be true, but I have no historical evidence to back it up. Next year, we’ll compare the dates for the Grinch special and Santa’s first day at work, then we’ll see.
2 responses to “The Myth of the Christmas Season Coming Earlier Every Year”
[…] The Junior Staff has done it again. Instead of reviewing his review per se, I’ll simply re-assess the topic through the lens of having read his review. The issue with his review is simply that it’s plain-old wrong and short-sighted. Nate hates Christmas. […]
[…] November 30th, 2006 Dan Though this was meant to correspond with Nate’s review of the first 100 reviews, schedules and, uh, not-feeling-like-it-at-the-moment-because-it’s-a-bit-daunting-of-a-task-itis, has delayed this “One Year Anniversary” review and pushed it into 13/14 months, but that’s fine by me. WARNING: Intense self-congratulation ahead. Nate’s recap covered things in a time-based manner, in fact you could almost call it a “temporal” recap. (HA!), so I’ll look at things a step back or so. Basically, this chart says that aside from people that randomly come across the site via search engines, a large portion of our readership seems to check back pretty regularly. When I had run the idea of a website by Nate, it was presented simply in a “wouldn’t it be funny if we reviewed anything-and-everything.” How often do people assign star rankings to things that aren’t arts or consumables? (Consumer Reports gives star ratings to lots of stuff, though it’s always physical items available for purchase). We never officially decided on what constitutes “reviewable”, but being that we’ve reviewed Pluto’s demotion (those bastards) and thrown an ambitious amount of words towards reviewing the hype surrounding various media properties, we’re definitely keeping our options open. From the beginning, we’ve dreaded the dirty “B” word. Our site looks like many, many sites associated with the “movement” associated with the B word; our site runs the same software that is one of the most popular B word platforms, and the fact that we usually indignantly explain “it’s a website, not one of those” when people refer to it as our “BLOG” just serves to establish how much like a blog it is. Well, though we’re wont to admit it, at the end of the day, we’re really not too far removed from the “blogosphere” – we just avoid the “I feel bad today because” style rampant in most blogs. Likewise, it’s rare that we read a random article online then say, “I think I’m going to review that” the way that many people who have blogs write snippets of “I read this article and I think this about it.” Nate did a good job wrapping up the first batch of reviews we did. Though the writing in those first reviews had “voice”, the big picture aspects of the site were still up in the air. My first review (about a really long baseball game) didn’t really accomplish much, though it did help to establish the implicit theme of our reviews and how we think we’d like aim to separate from the “blogosphere”: as everyone who writes anything on the internet, we think that we offer something new and interesting that is unique to our site. You could find people talking about how long that baseball game was and how great it was, but no one saying “well, actually, the game wasn’t any good.” This led into our future reviews, where we’re pretty much the only people writing about the topics (verbally harassing horses, recaps of great football injuries, the myth of the Christmas season coming earlier every year [as opposed to the complaint that it does or doesn’t come earlier every year] etc.) That’s not to say we didn’t write about things that were more straight-forward as needed. When I had bad luck with Vonage and when Nate’s long distance provider didn’t see that anything was out of the ordinary when his long distance bill went up somewhere in the 900%+ range, reviews were written. There, the goal was to try to make our bad experiences in consumerism known and hopefully somewhat entertaining. After we had established the criteria for whether or not something was considered reviewable, we looked toward more “touchy-feely” sort of goals. Well, at least I did. I’m not sure what Nate’s goals have been. The shear size of the internet makes it so any schmuck can make any website about any thing. That’s widely understood, and that’s fine, but it also gives space for incredibly, well, passionate (for better or for worse) defenses or critiques of topics that go (rightly) ignored in the mainstream print media. Heck, even a devoted sneaker magazine such as Sole Collector probably wouldn’t devote 1600 words to the Oakley Twitch. Likewise, Entertainment Weekly would never run 3500 words about Scrubs (and rightly so). One of the first websites that took advantage of this freedom afforded by the internet was the movie news/rumors site Ain’t It Cool News; it didn’t create the mold, but it had a lot to do with shaping what people expect from the internet. Ain’t It Cool News still “works” as a website almost 10 years after its creation, but it would never work as a traditional magazine or even newspaper. As I’ve said before, I don’t believe in the community “power” of the internet, but I will stand behind the sense of community that it can create. Ain’t It Cool News is famous for its rumors and news, but what sets it apart from, say, Variety or Entertainment Weekly are the actual movie reviews. Needless to say, read Harry Knowles’ review of Clerks 2, then read the Variety review. They’re both positive, but the limitations of “traditional journalism” are evident. Sure, Knowles’ review is a bit fanboy-ish, but there’s something to be said about liking a movie, then seeing someone else on the internet go out of his way explaining how and why it is that good. Oddly, it’s re-affirming in some way to see that someone is as over-the-top positive for a movie (or CD, or pair of sneakers, or a Star Wars promo video). What brings it all back is that my goal has been to write reviews that people who already like something end up liking it more after they’ve read it. I guess that’s sort of a pretentious if not presumptuous opinion of my own work, but that’s my goal. As always, there have been humorous reviews sprinkled in within the more serious (the Chinese basketball game, verbally harassing horses, etc.), but by-and-large I yearn to educate. So, here’s a recap. I like how every single review (well except Nate’s U2/Green Day one) has a picture and funny caption. Nate’s Saving Silverman review has a good one, and I’m still fond of my “Nate Hates Christmas” when we were feuding over whether Christmas comes early every year or earlier every year. I like how pop-ins created an entirely new dynamic within the articles, allowing for jokes that are completely removed from the review itself (such as “HE HAD THE HIGH GROUND” in my Star Wars review. In terms of stuff liked enough to call out… how Nate combined historical revisionism in cartoons with a defense of Pluto’s planethood […]