The Pumpkin-Headed Turkey Claus is the good saint of the OctoNovemCember holiday. You know, the holiday that used to be Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas, before crazed shoppers and retail outlets started mashing them all together to create a massive purchaspalooza celebration of consumergasms?
Yeah, that holiday.
I feel as if I'm in the minority. It's possible that I simply don't remember the past through anything other than a kid's naive eyes, but I don't remember having Christmas decorations up in stores before the Halloween candy was removed from shelves. I don't remember the Christmas music drowning out the Thanksgiving decorations either. And it seems every year the holidays still months away are getting shelf space earlier and earlier.
Thanksgiving doesn't even get much attention anymore, save for the football ads. In its place are flyers for Black Friday sales.
Of course many retailers realize that people who just want cheap gifts for Christmas may be getting tired of the occasional trampling and shoulder to shoulder crowds. There are people who take some kind of masochistic pleasure in the ritual of gorging on the Thanksgiving turkey and camping out for hours that night to be among the first to get into Wal-Mart and Target the next day, but plenty of others are just as happy getting their shopping done online with "Cyber Monday" deals.
But if everyone did their shopping on "Cyber Monday," where's the retail advantage in that? As Cyber Monday became more popular among the online savvy, retailers decided to move their deals so online savings can be had earlier, and lasting longer, as well. Like the pet boutique "Funny Fur", which decided to offer their savings from Thanksgiving day through Monday. Even Wal-Mart is getting in on the early online sales potential.
It shouldn't be much of a surprise, though. It fits the pattern. At first, holidays were celebrated on the actual holiday. Holiday cheer was reserved for the week before, a gradual buildup to the big day. Halloween was preceded by choosing costumes, maybe a holiday party at school, and anticipation of various candies and chocolate goodies. Thanksgiving had some sports events, true, but was also accompanied by feelgood (if not mostly fictional) stories of Pilgrims and friendly natives commiserating over a meal from a fortunate harvest. And Christmas? Christmas ruled the holiday season, with hopes of snow days from school fueling dreams of not just ham dinner with family but the big paper-shredding morning as boxes were sifted from the bedazzling blinking strands of lights adorning the Christmas tree. This had to be followed by watching A Christmas Story at least three times over the course of the day, no matter how much my family complained.
This wasn't good enough for retailers, though.
Sales were made by shoving the holiday purchasing message earlier. Halloween costumes go on sale as soon as the weather turns in these parts. Now it's not unusual to see Christmas trees for sale before Halloween night, except for grocery stores where Thanksgiving meals and ensuing football parties still drive their profits.
Not that it's really easy to notice, since various towns have decided to have designated "trick or treat" nights that are rarely actually on Halloween. In my home town adjacent townships have their own schedules, so it's possible, if you wanted, to trick or treat three or four times by crossing borders, and nothing is actually scheduled on Halloween itself for fear of kids pulling "pranks." At least, I suppose that's the reason for the wonky scheduling. Maybe it's a conspiracy to make it seem not so weird for candy to be on clearance sale as snowmen and blinking Santas are placed on the walls of Target on the night before Halloween.
The Christmas Spirit isn't so much absorbed over December as it is injected into your brain all of November and courses through your system like an earworm through December. Honestly, by the time Christmas rolls around, I'm relieved at the promise that the stores will stop playing the same damn tunes over and over.
It's not that I hate the holidays. Just today, November 19th, I sent this picture to the Twitterverse, saying it was a pretty sight:
It is a pretty tree, in my opinion. I do love blue!
I pretend it's not a Christmas tree, though.
Because it's November 19th.
So I agree with the tongue in cheek ads from RetailMeNot. We should have an OctoNovemCember. Complete with the Pumpkin-Headed Turkey Claus. Because then all this retail mingling with religious legends would make sense. A three month consumer orgasm of food, gluttony and family dinners all rolled into one. We sit around and pretend that the holidays are about family and good spirit while racking up debt so our children have toys to scatter around the house and candy to rot in the sofa cushions.
OctoNovemCember. It's a holiday I might learn to enjoy. It's so much less disingenuous than what we have now.
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