Holiday season has arrived. Tysons has set up its Christmas store, ornaments are hung up at businesses and restaurants, commercials and specials are beginning to air on TV and Christmas songs are playing on all the radio stations. There is only one problem: it’s mid-November.
The public’s obsession with the holidays is nothing new. Every year the same thing happens: stores fills up with ornaments and Christmas related items and Mariah Carey prepares for the millions of dollars she is bound to make for “All I Want for Christmas is You.”
Advertising for Christmas can begin as early as October, and I have personally seen it go as early as September.
While there is nothing inherently wrong with celebrating Christmas a little early, I have a few problems with it. For one thing, it is very annoying. Call me Scrooge or old fashioned, but I do not like the excessiveness of it all.
I dislike having to turn on the TV or visit a mall, or enter a friend’s car and have to deal with Christmas music, especially when it is not even a month away.
But even ignoring personal objections, this obsession with Christmas feels cheap. Often times, businesses advertise the idea of Christmas without really going into what makes Christmas, Christmas.
A holiday that is all about family and togetherness has over the years become more and more about money. Black Friday is a good example of this. Year after year millions of people trample each other in order to get a five percent discount on the new Xbox.
While this advertising exists for almost every holiday (Halloween and Valentines Day especially), it’s worse when discussing Christmas especially since it has a much longer holiday season.
Besides the underlying effect of capitalism on holiday joy, an almost two month long Christmas season takes away from other holidays, most notably Thanksgiving.
It feels that people constantly ignore Thanksgiving in favor of Christmas. While both holidays are both about togetherness and family, Christmas gets so much more attention.
This obsession with Christmas feels problematic, oftentimes businesses use it to get large sums of money from consumers.
As a society, we are losing the overall magic of the holidays to this brand which annoys people like me.