The holiday season is upon us. Halloween and Thanksgiving are over and Christmas and New Years are in the near future. But it seems as if Christmas is tomorrow, with how much we see it this early into the year.
It’s no secret that these holidays are money machines. Around 936 billion dollars are spent yearly on Christmas gifts, with the average household spending around 1400 dollars. Companies know this, and try their hardest to get buyers in the store to buy gifts. They advertise products in order to get shoppers into their store.
But does this actually help get people into their stores? There are many factors as to why they start advertising this early. First is Black Friday.
Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving every year, and businesses will have their products significantly cheaper than what they typically sell them at in order to draw people in. This date is typically around a month before Christmas starts, so it is the perfect time to buy Christmas gifts.
Every time I see Christmas decorations before the month of December, I just want to leave the place immediately.
— Grady Stoll
It also helps that Black Friday has become less stressful in recent years. Everyone has seen the videos of people fighting over inexpensive items on Black Friday. But because of the pandemic, people couldn’t go out, so stores sold their goods online. Online sales have more than tripled in the past decade. So now people don’t even need to leave the comfort of their own home in order to get the same deals.
Another factor is that Thanksgiving isn’t exactly a marketable holiday. With the exception of food and decorations, there is really nowhere to make sales for Thanksgiving. But anything and everything can be sold for Christmas. So companies that can’t sell products for Thanksgiving will just skip over it and go straight to Christmas.
Besides the advertising, there are many other things associated with Christmas that people are forced to deal with very early. For example, many stores are already playing Christmas music, even though we are not very close to Christmas. “I think Mariah Carey started defrosting a little early this year, as in all of the stores, all I hear is Christmas music, and it ticks me off,” sophomore Mason Shantz remarks. Shantz is referring to Mariah Carey’s hit song, “All I Want For Christmas is You,” which seems to start playing earlier every year.
What do people think of this early start to holiday shopping though? When asked the main question of the article, many people seemed to have the same opinion.
“Yes, I’m tired of seeing a man in red robes,” Shan Ranganath states.
In agreement, Grady Stoll states, “Every time I see Christmas decorations before the month of December, I just want to leave the place immediately.”
“Yeah,” says sophomore James McManus
However, not everybody shares this same view. “No, it’s never too early,” says Owen Chen. There are people that still do love the Christmas spirit, and think that Christmas can never start too early.
