Christmas Creep...

We are all aware of it, it smacks us in the face every year, a couple days earlier than the last.  You walk into your friendly neighborhood Target (or K-Mart, or Wal-Mart, or Quik-E-Mart) and there it is... Christmas decorations!  It was silly when it started appearing around mid-October before little ghouls and goblins had even begun to delight in their saccharin hordes, it's down right ridiculous now that it's popping up during back-to-school sales in the beginning of September... madness!  Now I love Christmas, I devour Christmas when it arrives.  From the spiritual joy and hope it brings me every year when I celebrate our Lord's birth to all the superfluous trimmings Santa and his kin bring along for the ride. I love it, the decorations, the lights, the music, the parties, the turkey, grandma's pudding pie and cupcakes, the Christmas crackers, trimming the tree, watching Christmas movies and TV specials... I get high on the Christmas season every year.  It allows you to take all those things and use them to enrich your bonds with friend and family.  While it's been rather lackluster in recent years, the end of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade holds as much meaning and, if you will, magic, for me now as it did when I was a kid.  Santa Claus closing down the parade meant Christmas was here!  After the 25 days of December and the 12 days of Christmas have come and gone, I feel a sense of loss. The same feeling you get when you have a house full of company over for a couple days and right when the noise and chatter starts to wear on you and you're thinking "ok, it's time for everyone to go" they do go, and then the sudden deafening silence makes everything feel somewhat empty and hollow... No? Maybe that's just me. :)

Seeing the Christmas Creep ebb it's way closer and closer to summer vacation turns my stomach more and more every year.  By the time the holiday finally comes knocking on your door, you've already grown so tired of seeing it's merry face you start to think ole Ebenezer was on to something.  I've gone so far as to write the various factions warring for my consumer dollars to plead my case (www.planetfeedback.com is a great tool for pulling a modern day Andy Dufresne).  It's a drop in the Atlantic ocean for sure, but still a drop more than before, and so the creep continues. What makes me laugh most is that I see fellow shoppers making the same comments and expressing the same foul taste it's left on their tongues.  Scrunching up their faces the same way I just did mere seconds prior with that look that says "Christmas!? Already? Really?!"  It really does seem like the overall majority of people, at least in the tri-state, don't like Christmas creep anymore than I do.

I can only hope that one day there is enough of a backlash that companies wake up and readjust their store planning schedules.  It's either that or the Creep goes back so far that it returns to normal, like a clock rolling back a full 24 hours. :)  Now what brought up this thought of Christmas Creep was my lunchtime experience at K-Mart today.  I descended down bottom level of the Big K to be greeted by... you guessed it, Christmas decorations!  Trees, lights, stockings, lawn ornaments... wait... wth!

I've seen some zany crap before, but how in the 7 hells of Sloatsburg does a Stegosaurus = Christmas?!  Then again, I might actually have to rethink my stance on this Christmas Creep thing if these are the types of Indiana Jones-esque discoveries I'm going to be making in mid-September!  I almost wish I had the time, because I would have loved to have grabbed a folding chair, a cold drink and a bag of popcorn and just waited to see the first paleontologist to come along and see that thing, yelling "OMG! THAT'S PERFECT" as they saunter off to check out with their brand new Jurassic treat! :)