Christmas Season Begins After Thanksgiving
A Jolly Defense of Keeping this Festive Season Merry and Bright, Despite the Crass Forces of Radical Change that Seek to Undermine It
I suspect about half of my readers will find this funny, but that some readers will accuse me of taking this too seriously. With all due respect, I don’t think I did…
Someone on Twitter asked recently whether there was anyone left who still waited until after Thanksgiving to put the Christmas decorations up. She wanted to know whether there was a single, solitary soul left in this country willing to defend custom and tradition against the slippery slope of holiday creep (actually, that’s not what she said, but I’m paraphrasing).
Ah, but of course there are. “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers,” as William Shakespeare noted in Henry V. We few who recognize that Christmas cannot begin until after Thanksgiving, because otherwise the sun will stop coming up (at least, that’s what I think will happen if we give in to holiday creep).
Last year, I wrote the story, “Christmas Creep,” to satirize my own personal quest to begin the Christmas season on December 1st (with a notable exception granted for the first Sunday in Advent). Incidentally or not, the story also satirizes the insanity that is year-round holiday decoration (with two months for Valentine’s Day, one month for Halloween, one month for college/high school graduation, etc.).