Seasons
I love Christmas, especially in late December! I drove by a house the other day and noticed the owner up on a ladder, hanging Christmas lights. I drove by today, and he was putting lighted trees and reindeer in the front yard. It’s the first day of October for heaven’s sake.
I like seasons. When I grew up school started the day after Labor Day. Thanksgiving was the final weekend of deer season. The fire department strung the Christmas lights across the three main streets in town the week before Thanksgiving. On Thanksgiving night, the streets were full of people admiring how well the town looked. Snow on the ground made it look like Currier and Ives. The day after Thanksgiving, the shop windows debuted their Christmas windows. This year some stores displayed decorations in September. Don’t you like things the way they are supposed to be?
Longer and longer shopping seasons crept up on us unawares. Stores opened at mid-night on Thanksgiving evening, then a couple of years later, at nine o’clock. It only took a few years before Thanksgiving dinner had to be in the early afternoon so that people could line up for the six o’clock store opening. Little time for giving thanks! Now, of course, stores want to open early on Christmas day so that people can exchange their gifts for what they wanted in the first place, and at prices marked down even further than a day earlier. Easter is in the same quagmire, with displays in the stores even before Lent starts. Halloween starts in August as far as the stores are concerned, when really it’s not until October 31st. I would think now is the time to hang Halloween decorations, not Christmas lights.
I’ve tried hard to follow the seasons. Maybe it hides my natural propensity for procrastination. Anyway, the lights went on the house after Thanksgiving. The tree went up the first week of December at the earliest and didn’t come down until Epiphany Sunday. Easter followed Advent on the first Sunday after the first full moon after March 21, the vernal equinox. Most people don’t know that, so I didn’t have to rush with the decorations. I like the predictability.
Holidays became all about selling. The competition between stores and the internet is fierce and the seasons, especially Christmas, make or break the bottom line for many companies. This explains the extended shopping seasons throughout the year. I know all this, but I still wish the guy down the street would wait until December to hang the lights.
