We already know that retail marketers are shape-shifters, perhaps not quite like Odo, the Star Trek character played by René Auberjonois, but they are ever-shifting, ever-adapting, and ever in our faces with some reason to buy, buy, buy, on their schedule, not ours.
Tonight's evening news featured a story about a major State Street (Chicago) department store's unveiling of its Christmas window displays, the Governor of Illinois lighting its 45-foot Christmas tree, with thousands of lights and ornaments, and yes, somebody singing an over-the-top hopped up version of Jingle Bells - the kind of music that makes we wish that we Christians could just have another day altogether and leave this "holiday" for the marketers. Following that story was an ad for a home furnishings store's "Pre-Veterans' Day" sale. Let me get this straight. It's not yet Veterans' Day, but we're having a Veterans' Day furniture sale. This is of course, weeks before Thanksgiving, which is in turn weeks before Christmas, which we are already celebrating.
If we have to be bombarded by all of this commercial clap-trap for the next several weeks, can we please at least do it in sequence? One passerby, interviewed by the news crew covering the Christmas window unveiling said, "It's never too soon to start the holiday season." Really? Would December 26th be too soon? Yes. November 2nd is also too soon, unless you are an adept manipulator of rifts in the space-time continuum. In that case, the calendar is irrelevant, holidays can come in any order, or all at once. Maybe that's the solution. Let's just line up all of the holidays, one after another, shop 'til we drop and be done with it by mid-January and start again around the 1st of March.
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