It’s Beginning To Look a Lot Like Christmas

On the evening of October 31st, I picked up a couple of extra bags of trick-or-treat (but really for me) candy at our local drug store. The décor was appropriately spook-centric… spiders, ghosts, monsters and jack o’lanterns. But when I visited the very same drug store the next day, I was greeted by a much scarier sight. Santas, stockings, wreaths, reindeer and all things red and green. I don’t know when it became official, but November 1st now seems to be well established as the first day of the Christmas onslaught. Halloween is the only thing holding it at bay and keeping the holidays from crossing the border into October like an invading Mongol horde.

I remember as a boy, the excitement for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, which was generally accepted as the beginning of ‘tis the season. Even as a little Jewish kid, I understood the significance of Santa’s first big public appearance at that event. From that point on, we were resigned to a month of jingling bells and decking the halls. But two whole months of making merry? It’s more than I can stomach. And I don’t think I’m alone. I’ve always heard it said that the suicide rate goes up around the holidays. I wonder if the people who keep track of that gory data are expanding their measurement of the season as well. It would only make sense, don’t you think?

Back in 1958, the great subversive comedy recording artist Stan Freberg released “Green Chri$tma$”, a novelty record that was a scathing satire of the commercialization of the holidays by the advertising companies. Freberg took Dickens’ classic “A Christmas Carol” and portrayed Scrooge as an ad-man. If you can find it, give it a listen. It’s still brilliant. However, I have to say, the once controversial record now seems almost sentimental and quaint. It’s now an accepted truth that so much of our retail economy depends on Christmas dollars. An American tradition. Having grown up the son of a Macy’s department store manager, I guess I shouldn’t be the one to be raining on the early Macy’s day parade… so to speak. But I just wish we could have kept the season in its place. Having said all that… Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night!