Everything can only be stretched so far before it is damaged, and that includes the Christmas season.
I think we can all agree with Andy Williams. The Christmas season is indeed the most wonderful time of the year, so stop ruining the magic of that time by trying to push it beyond what it’s meant to be.
In recent years, the Christmas season has become an event spanning more than just the 12 days we all know and love.
Numerous aspects of the Christmas season have begun to creep beyond the natural time of the Christmas season. Christmas lights go up before Thanksgiving, Christmas music is played beyond the first week of January, and Christmas commercials are aired even before Halloween.
Too much of Christmas, like any good thing, can eventually be a bad thing.
One of the greatest things about Christmas is that everyone is excited about one thing for a relatively short period of time. It is a special time of year that you just can’t recreate at any other point in time. Trying to push it beyond its short window detracts from the power of that special Christmas spirit.
As you try to make the Christmas season longer and longer, it becomes less and less special. If the Christmas season was a year-round affair, Christmas wouldn’t be all that special anymore, would it?
Christmas is a lot like when you find a song that you love and play on repeat again and again and again. The more you play it, the quicker you get tired and even annoyed by it. The amount you play that song can even affect how those around you feel about that song, especially if you haven’t been using headphones, which is another major issue altogether.
Exposure to the Christmas season, much like a really good song, over too long of a period of time can quickly put someone out of the spirit and ruin the novelty of the season.
As far as holidays go, Christmas is already becoming a long slog for some people. It has nearly a whole month leading up to it and 11 days following it. All those days quickly add up (to 33 days total from Black Friday to January 7 in this year’s case). We can’t afford to be squandering our days of intense Christmas spirit in early November.
As a society, we’re already pushing the boundaries of what an acceptable length of the Christmas season is while being able to preserve the special spirit in the air that the Christmas season brings.
Instead of burning everyone out before we’ve even gotten to Christmas, put that Christmas spirit in a little imaginary box, and keep it shut tight. Once Black Friday rolls around, unleash it in all its glory.
Sound the trumpets. Put up a tree in your living room and decorate it. Bring out all of the decorations that have been accumulating a layer of dust and cobwebs in your crawl space since last Christmas. String up your lights. Go nuts. Enjoy the season and all it entails.
And then, after the first week of January, put all the Christmas stuff away. Silence the trumpets. Put the tree out by the curb. Put the decorations back to gather a fresh layer of dust. Take down the lights.
Finally, take your remaining Christmas spirit, and put it back in that little imaginary box until next Christmas. There, over time, it will build into an equally powerful force for next year.
No holiday should be ruined for someone by other people, Christmas especially. So please, let us at least get to Thanksgiving before we launch into Christmas.
