Londonderry News

She came running into the room, her voice rushed and just a bit higher than usual. “No, no, no…turn it off.  Turn it off!”

“What?  What?”  I asked my wife, surprised at this outburst.  “What did I do?”

“Just find another station!” she said.  So I did.  I spun the dial to our usual talk radio station and off of her usual “soft rock” station, which had just been blasting out “Jingle Bell Rock” on this, the day after Halloween.

“That better?” I asked, still confused…and worried.  She hadn’t been this agitated since her last caesarian birth, nineteen years ago.

She nodded.  And thankfully explained.  “That station does this to me every year.  As soon as Halloween rolls around, they start with the Christmas music.  It’s way too early to listen to Christmas music.”

And I had to agree.  While it’s often been said that we should celebrate Christmas every day, the commercial side of the holiday has obviously been creeping up slowly with each passing year.  As a kid in the 60s, I recall that we’d start to hear the familiar Christmas tunes around the beginning of December.  It always seemed to coincide with the first snowfall. Music to shovel by, I guess.

The nuns at Immaculate Conception grade school would never even think of rolling out Christmas carols before the first Sunday in Advent.  Probably more so to save themselves the agony of eighty fifth-graders vocally destroy such Church classics as “We Three Kings” and “Silent Night”.  But not before the real season – the nuns followed the traditional Church calendar.  No Christmas before it’s time.

Eventually, Thanksgiving became the commercial kick-off point for Christmas – and it held there for years.  I think the hope was to at least get past one holiday before we started celebrating the next.  A reasonable compromise.  This, of course, led to the emergence of that big shopping day, the day after Thanksgiving, which eventually became known as Black Friday.  It’s been said that something like 110% of all retail sales for the year are made on that one day – the minus 10% is all those Christmas returns, I suppose…

But the Christmas gerbils didn’t stop there.  Starting a few years ago, we began to see all those fake Christmas trees strewn across the aisles at Sears and WalMart and Home Depot before Thanksgiving.  We started to hear Christmas songs on some of the radio stations and a few confused folks even had their houses decorated with Christmas lights before the turkeys hit the chopping block for the Pilgrims Feast.  We saw Christmas cards displayed side by side with Thanksgiving Day cards at the Hallmark Store.  It was unsettling to us, unholy even… but society said nothing.

So those who benefit most from the commercial aspects of Christmas gave the holiday another nudge.  Until we eventually got to where we are today.  As soon as the final chord of “The Monster Mash” ends at the last Halloween party, the first strains of “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas” kick in.  Black Friday has now spawned “Black Sunday through Wednesday”, “Black Saturday Every Week Before Christmas” and, what the heck, even “Black Month – A Whole Month of Christmas Savings!” – all kicking in before Mom even lays the mashed potatoes on the Thanksgiving dinner table.

Strangely, television seems to be the only medium that hasn’t yet entirely caught the pre-Christmas, pre-Thanksgiving, lets-meld-it-into-Halloween theme of the holiday.  But it probably won’t be long… because the commercial folks are the ones who advertise on TV.  And when they can see the benefit to advertising that early, then they’ll go for it too.  And we’ll be watching Yukon Cornelius and the Bumbles (they bounce, you know) following right behind Jason, Dracula, and Chuckie.   That could be scary.

Oh, well… I guess, as long as Jesus knows when His birthday is, we should be okay.  Political correctness has, after all, pushed the Christmas holiday into October, but not the Christmas holy day.  They won’t touch that one.  And if they do, well, I’ll hear my wife voicing her displeasure over that too.  Probably around February…when we start hearing commercials for the Big Fourth of July Pre-Holiday Sale.