Christmas In Your Face!

Awright, c’mon people.  We gotta stop this.  As Barney Fife said, “Nip it in the bud!”  It’s gone on far enough.  If we don’t put an end to it now, in a few years the tinsel will start going up right around when Major League Baseball is having the all-star game.

Or maybe once again your friend and humble narrator is on the losing side of history.  Sometimes I feel like Kevin McCarthy at the end of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers: flailing arms at indifferent traffic, vainly hoping that somebody, anybody will heed the warning.

Last week was Halloween.  That afternoon I was on the highway en route to meet a client and started scanning through radio stations.  More than a few had well-curated themes for the day (“Thriller”, “Dark Lady”, even “Clap For The Wolfman” etc.).  Stopping on one channel, I was expecting to hear either “Monster Mash” or at least an Elton John hit…

Instead it was Eartha Kitt singing “Santa Baby”.

Practically two months before Christmas.  Four weeks before Thanksgiving.  Hours before Halloween candy was going to be doled out to the trickster-treatsters.  And already a radio station had begun holiday season music twenty-four seven.

By the end of the following work week, three stations had begun Christmas music pausing only for commercial breaks.  Those, too, have become riddled with sleigh bells ringing.

And then my Facebook feed began filling up with photos of Christmas trees going up.

Maybe it's just me, but at this point in November the only things associated with the holiday should be rehearsals and scenery for productions of A Christmas Carol…

Rome wasn't built in a day.  Neither was Victorian London.

…or professional Santas needing to size up whether kids one to ninety-two have been naughty or nice:

Steampunk Santa
(Eric H. Smith, renaissance man extraordinaire)

Charles Schulz and Bill Melendez left us before their work was done.  I can see it now: A Charlie Brown Christmas Part II, with grown-up good ol’ Chuck on the sofa in his therapist’s office, lamenting how there’s too much Christmas.  And the shrink telling him “wah-wah-wah-waaaah.”

It has become a yuleslide into madness.  

What’s wrong with us?

What in a sane world should be no more than a single month of festivity has now crept across fully one-sixth of the entire year.  And now, well…

Christmas just isn’t that special anymore.

I always thought it would be something to be truly thankful for, to put up a Christmas tree with the kids no earlier than three weeks before the big day, Chipmunks singing all the while.  But Chipmunks music before Thanksgiving should be nobody’s idea of fun.

Dad used to shoot mistletoe out of trees with his rifle.  I’m not sure that mistletoe is even in season before November.

Anyone else remember the old Sears Wishbook catalogues?  How I used to ogle those beautiful two-page spreads of Star Wars toys.  Like the mirage of a distant oasis promising shade and water, and that sliver of magnificence beckoning to trudge through those three months until Christmas.  That’s all of the holidays that we had at that point on the calendar.  That’s all we needed, maybe even wanted.  Any more than that and it would not possibly have been enjoyable.  Indeed, it would have robbed from the eventual thrill.  The Wishbooks taught me in their own way that delayed gratification is a virtue.

Nobody seems to know what delayed gratification is anymore.  And that’s a tragic, tragic thing.  Waiting has become a weakness.  Patience, an alien quality.

Or maybe making Christmas come quicker is just part and parcel with our society in general.  When people are throwing tantrums about slow wi-fi and some getting literally killed for a Popeye’s chicken sandwich, something has gone terribly wrong.

Christmas should be a solid punctuation at the end of every year.  Instead it has become a vague bloated morass encroaching toward summer and spring.

Am I bearing any animosity or grudge toward those who are “getting into the Christmas spirit” way early?  No, of course not.  And if my friends and neighbors are feeling the sincere tug of the season already, well... I won't judge them.  Not at all.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to realize ever more so that there are very few things worth having ill will over.  Life is too short.  Way too short.

It’s just that making the Christmas season come about earlier and earlier is making the entire year go by faster and faster.  It’s making that precious lifetime even more brief.

And it would be nice if it could be stretched out and marveled at for its own sake.  Instead of what I’m coming to be persuaded that Lucy was right about: Christmas as nothing but a scheme by a big eastern syndicate.

That’s not what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.

Christmas shouldn't be in our faces.  It shouldn’t be worn on our sleeves this early on.  It shouldn't be in our wallets and pocketbooks.

Christmas should be in our hearts.  And what the heart pours forth so wantonly, too often becomes lesser so sacred.