Jingle bells playing, lights lit and all the holiday decorations are up… until you remember that it’s not even Halloween yet. Walking into a mall anytime after about Oct. 15 is an experience that will bombard you with holiday decorations and premature Christmas spirit, and it’s definitely for the worse.
There is no need to start Christmas before calendars turn to December. When Christmas starts this early, it has more negative impacts than just making us all forget about the other holidays that come before, especially for retail employees.
“I love Christmas in my house starting early, but in general retail, it creates a hostile environment with even more business traffic and large families that have no respect for the store or the workers in general meaning that it starts too early,” said senior Abby Urbanski, who works at Hollister.
While you may want to get in the holiday spirit before December, doing that in your own home is the best method to accomplish this. Just because you want to get in the holiday spirit in October does not mean the rest of the world wants to as well. Stores putting up Christmas decorations seems to get earlier every year.
“Starting Christmas Dec. 1 gives the feeling of Christmas that people are looking for instead of starting it so early so then you have people saying that ‘It doesn’t feel like Christmas when we put up holiday decorations in November,’” said Urbanski.
This ridiculous tradition is one that is disliked not just by students and retail workers, but also by teachers.
“Christmas decorations should go up around Dec. 1. Before Thanksgiving is not okay. The ‘holiday season’ has a monthly rhythm that I like to stick to,” said choir teacher Bill Campbell.
Hopefully, sometime soon people will understand the impact of putting these decorations up so early isn’t just extending the season and people will start to reign it in.
