When it comes to the barrage of holidays at the end of the year, nothing compares to the double whammy of Halloween and Christmas. They’re the perfect holidays. However, such enthusiasm often leaves stores confused as to which holiday would grant them more customers. 

“It’s very confusing,” local Spirit Halloween chain owner Laura Winters notes . “I’ve been doing Halloween since the start of October, but nobody has been here much! Now we’re three days in, and I’ve been putting Christmas hats on all the skulls. People seem to love it!” Laura has been inhabiting the same Spirit Halloween store for seven years. While her craft is explicitly Halloween, the Christmas spirit is more prevalent than ever. 

“I only had my Halloween decorations up for most of August, but Christmas is coming up soon,” local shop owner Linda Weitwhial reports. “When does it really begin, though? I usually think it starts during November, but I know people get Christmas gifts as early as July! Maybe the Christmas spirit is year-round!” As Weitwhial attests, Halloween is quickly becoming lost in the transition. Christmas always takes over the last fourth of the year, every year. Maybe this surge in Christmas-related propaganda is because Christmas is the last holiday of the year. Maybe it’s because Thanksgiving is a nonentity; where its creation was not simply to mark a famous fall feast between the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag tribe, but to mark the end the beginning of the Christmas season. The question must be asked though, who puts up decorations for Thanksgiving? 

The answer to this question is that nobody does. It is because of this lack of decorations that many people simply forget about it. That is not to say that they forget about it entirely. Rather, Thanksgiving sneaks up on the unsuspecting populace and it isn’t until about two weeks away that people realize. Suddenly, everything is about Thanksgiving: the advertisements, turkeys are everywhere, everyone will be wearing hats with buckles on them and there will be people complaining about how we should just skip Thanksgiving and get on to Christmas. In short, Thanksgiving is the quiet middle child of the holiday trio.

With the weather getting colder, it’s time to realize the inevitability of Christmas. In the 21st century, Christmas is one the most important holidays in the world (rivaling Talk like a Pirate Day in the 18th century). People will hang on to the thought of Christmas precisely because there is literally nothing else positive about the onslaught of cold weather. It’s just miserable all around. Not only does cold powder fall from the sky and kill everything it touches, but now instead of the sun warming us up naturally, we need to physically take action and do it ourselves if we get cold. Am I not suffering enough from my schoolwork? Now I have to actually put on a sweatshirt to stay warm?  What are we coming to! Oh yes, the Christmas season, of course! So when we poke fun at shops decorating for Christmas too soon, we really ought to ask ourselves, “Is there such thing as celebrating Christmas too early?”