Okay, people. Two houses on the drive between my place and, well, the rest of the world, have Christmas decorations up. I don’t mean tinsel. I mean major freakin’ department-store-scale displays.
Quick date check: it’s at least a couple of weeks until Thanksgiving. I remember seeing one of the aforementioned Christmas displays lit up on Halloween night as I drove little E home from trick-or-treating.
It’s bad enough that the stores decided that Christmas starts at 11:59pm on October 31st. When did the rest of us start buying into this? Since when does the average family in middle America take its holiday decorating cues from the retail giants?
Well, that’s not our case at home. My parents have never put up Christmas lights outside the house and they usually buy the Christmas tree and decorate it about a week before Christmas. But I do remember a house near where they live that was akin to Chevy Chase’s house in Christmas Vacation (gotta wonder how much they paid in electricity bill every year!).
But yeah, the way early Christmas madness is ridiculous. Here it’s even worse due to the fact that we don’t have the later Thanksgiving between Halloween and Christmas…
The giant park across the street from Mason’s school gets converted to a huge Christmas display every year. It’s a fund raiser for the city (they ask for donations for people who drive through, looking at the lights), but it’s such a large display that they have to start on it months in advance. I noticed this year that they started mid-October. Last week while I was picking the kids up from school the city was testing the light display, so yeah, I’m already seeing a giant Christmas display the week after Halloween.
The display itself isn’t what irks me; it’s the fact that while they’re working on putting up the display they close the PUBLIC park. More than once I’ve taken the kids up to the park to play only to find it barricaded off. Fortunately the barricades are made of cheap wood and I drive a big truck.
I make up for it by not putting up any Xmas decorations. I haven’t done so in the last 21 years. I have no plans to do so in the future.