The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

Published October 23, 2007
One Comment (at bottom of article)

By Mac Smith

It’s become apparent that Corporate America is too festive for me. Wal-Mart has decided to start cutting prices in mid-October. Sears and Montgomery Ward have already printed their holiday shopping catalogs. L.L. Bean and J.C. Penney have followed suit with holiday sales of their own.

Each year, I start off with the same expectations for miracles, love, and good will, but ultimately, my patience grows shorter with every holiday season. Every year, I just get more fed up with the whole thing.

I love Christmas. I get a month off from school and go home, where it’s cold, but not Burlington cold. I catch up on lost quality time with my parents and brother by drinking eggnog (wink, wink), watching football, and playing Halo. My aunt comes over with her brilliant chocolate-chip cookies, and my grandmother with newly knit sweaters and scarves. There’s also the tree, the way that tree makes the room smell, and the things that go under the tree when the fat man breaks into my house and steals my aunt’s cookies.

It’s good. However, everyone knows from experience with raw cookie dough, tequila, or Dane Cook, that too much of a good thing totally sucks. This is the problem with the holiday season, which seems to begin earlier and earlier every year.

Remember the good ole’ days? I’m talking about when most of us were kids. We enjoyed a fall season that was not interrupted by corporate holiday advertising. Halloween, before it became the drunken-sex capital of holidays, came
and went peacefully, without razors and syringes. Weeks would pass and the temperature would dip until Thanksgiving, which still is the eat-all-we-can-and-fall-asleep-in-front-of-the football-game capital of holidays. The end of Thanksgiving would finally usher in the official Holiday Season.

Despite the festive lawn decorations, candy canes, and that mix tape by Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby, I only cared about one thing: Presents, presents, and more presents. I wanted everything I saw advertised by Toys R’ Us, Macy’s, and F.A.O. Schwarz. So I carefully crafted my Christmas List and hoped like hell everything would turn out alright. Before I knew it, it was Christmas morning, I had what I wanted (except for that one stocking stuffer that was supposed to be “educational”), and life was good. No matter how old I got, I never was too old for that wonderful feeling.

Those feelings have been hijacked so that the major retailers in this country can beat their record toy sales of last year. What happened to Halloween? What if we started buying those fun size Three Musketeers bars in August and took a week off of school in May for the 4th of July? It’d be pure anarchy.

Corporate America should stop downplaying Halloween and Thanksgiving. These two wonderful holidays remind us of two important things. We love to break treaties and steal land, and we’re all going to Hell. I want December to be here as much as the next person, but it can’t be rushed. It’s still 65 degrees outside, and I don’t want Wal-Mart sponging up my holiday spirit. I’m going to wait, patiently.

But maybe I’ll have a look at this season’s Macy’s catalogue. Just for fun.

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