In mid-October, we were working on a painting project indoors, which required a few trips to Lowe’s or Home Depot. Mid-October. Not even Halloween yet. So, what do we see at the stores?

Christmas decorations. Christmas trees. Huge inflatable Christmas lawn ornaments. Christmas wrapping paper. *sigh* At the mall, the White Barn Candle Co. already has most of their store converted over to holiday gifts. (We also had the added bonus of hearing some wretched Christmas music playing…some horrible blonde faceless autotuned warbling tunelessly along to synths and drum machines.) The Hallmark stores have the ornaments out, and just about everything else related to Dec. 25th.

Enough already! Don’t retailers realize they are burning us all out on the idea of Christmas? I’m personally sick and tired of looking at it all and hearing about it, and it’s not even Thanksgiving yet! We were just talking about it at home here the other day. When we were growing up, the true early birds were the ones who put their trees up on Thanksgiving weekend. Even back then, I felt it was too early. 100 years ago, most families went out on Christmas Eve, cut their own tree down, decorated it, and had it up to put the presents under the next morning. And it was usually gone within a few days.

I guess I just don’t understand this obsession with what amounts to one over-commercialized day out of the year. I do like the idea of spending time together with the kids and getting them a few nice gifts. We also enjoy making treats that we normally would not make, and the change of decor in the house for a few weeks is a welcome change. Do we really need to be spending three months out of every year hyping up one single day? No, we don’t. I still like some aspects of the day, but c’mon, it’s one day, and in the grand scheme of life, is not a very important one. Just chalk it up to corporate greed, I guess–the people didn’t ask for this three-long shopping frenzy. The retailers did. And they start their annual carrot dangling earlier and earlier every year.