Suzanne Harrington: Christmasification of November — no, no, no

Suzanne Harrington: not onboard with all this early Christmas

Today, it is still November. It’s been November all month, and it will still be November tomorrow. And what are the first two letters in November? N.O. No, we don’t want to think about December even slightly. No, no.

Yet the Christmas-industrial complex overrides this basic fact every single year, annually extending its brazen invasion of November ever further, and turning an increasing number of mild-mannered citizens into foaming Santaphobes. 

Why do we tolerate this creeping Christmasification of November, formerly a perfectly anonymous month featuring very little besides getting your winter coat out, maybe upgrading the denier of your tights?

How dare those marketing grinches of the primary gifting period steal a lovely dull month and stuff it full of shiny clamour, so that it becomes impossible not to think about the inevitable happenings of late December? 

Since when has it been acceptable to turn two days – December 25 and 26 – into two months of shouting at us to buy glitzy shit we don’t need? Why have we allowed this to happen, this annual festive mission creep?

And yet rather than fighting back with placards and loudhailers outside any shop selling mince pies the day after Halloween, we’ve rolled over like sedated Labradors, floppy and vacant, shrugging that it’s probably best to be prepared. 

As though Christmas is some kind of Armageddon doomsday situation, except with brussels sprouts and paper hats. And it’s getting worse. We now have ‘Black Friday.’

Instead of folding our arms and stubbornly refusing to even whisper the word ‘tinsel’ until at least the second week of December, we have allowed this imported idiocy to become a thing. 

An actual thing, despite its origins – Americans stampeding over each other to get flat-screen tellies a bit cheaper, in commemoration of an English boat turning up on their coastline in 1621 – not being remotely connected with anything to do with us. 

(Not that it was their coastline either, but this is about the colonisation of Christmas, rather than the Americas).

In Ireland and the UK, we don’t do Thanksgiving — yet we have adopted this November shopping scrum, before our December one even starts. What are we, masochists? Maniacs? Muppets? 

Instead of recognising Black Friday for the swizz that it is —Which magazine reports how 99.5% of the ‘deals’ and ‘bargains’ are not bargains at all, just rearranged price tags — we suck it up. We drink the Kool Aid. And it’s still only November.

The strategy of the Christmas-industrial complex seems to have taken its inspiration from Guantanamo – waterboard us with supermarket shelves stacked to the ceiling full of glittery landfill tat and seductively packaged food, schmoozing us like Nigella on Viagra, when it’s still November, then blast us relentlessly with Christmas songs the second the calendar shifts to December. 

Break us, smash our resistance, until we are numb and compliant, pushing trolleys piled with seasonal junk, Stepford style. Yay.