A Defense of Early Christmas Decorations

Y’all, the holiday season is upon us. Halloween came and went in full force, daylight savings has come to destroy our lives, and Thanksgiving is up next. My social media is rife with people on both sides of this argument: when should Christmas decorations go out? Many will argue that Early Christmas decorations rob Thanksgiving of its glory – I’m here to tell you that simply isn’t true. I am here to vehemently defend my right to break out the stockings on November 1. See, I love Christmas, as I’ve written before, here, here, and here. And I believe we should embrace the early season celebration.

Read: Edgar Allan Poe: A Real Weird Dude

Don’t get crazy – wait until Halloween is over.

Let spooky season have its time. Halloween is actually one of my favorite holidays because it’s the only time besides a comic convention where large-scale cosplay is acceptable. Plus, free candy, y’all.

Now I know, there’s all kinds of paganism and many Christians are uncomfortable with Halloween. I get that, I really do. But I’m not celebrating witchcraft, I’m celebrating the American holiday of costumes and candy. Y’all know that Christmas trees have pagan roots too? Birthday cakes certainly aren’t a Biblical mandate. Nearly every holiday we celebrate today is just a commercialized version of something very old.

And while Halloween has retained the dark, pagan aspects more than most holidays, It’s also closely associated with harvest celebrations, and it is so easy to find church based harvest celebrations with the same fun costume contests and free candy. So really, you can have all of the fun without any of the spooky!

Bottom line is, I think whatever holiday you celebrate on October 31 deserves its own place. Pumpkins, candy corn, costumes, and bats all belong in October. (On that note, you know bats are basically just sky puppies, right? There’s nothing about bats that makes them inherently spooky. #lovethebats) Get your costume ready and ride all the carnival rides and get all the pumpkins. But come November 1, it’s on my friend.

November and December belong to Christmas.

But what about Thanksgiving? I hear you whine. Stop whining. Whining gets a timeout in our house. I think of Thanksgiving as a sort of… pre-Christmas. See, we’re not actually celebrating the origins of Thanksgiving as a holiday either. Did you know that the first Thanksgiving took place in the middle of a bloody and devastating war with the native Americans, who likely weren’t even invited to the feast? I’m dropping all kinds of uncomfortable truth bombs on you today! While there are several accounts of the event, the one thing we do know for sure is that the pilgrims’ relationship with the indigenous people of North America is definitely not as cute as we make it out to be.

Today, We use the third Thursday in November to celebrate family and be thankful for all of our blessings. That’s wonderful! We should do that all the time. We use Thanksgiving as a time to spend together, recognizing how fortunate and blessed we are to have each other. We should be doing that on Christmas too. So really, Thanksgiving is all of the wonderful sentiment, just minus the gifts. And also less focus on the Christmas story… you get my point.

I didn’t put all this time and money into my beautiful Christmas decorations just to take it down 30 days later, y’all.

When we finally go into a house, rather than an apartment, I went a little crazy amassing Christmas decorations. I was so stoked to have a space big enough for all the things I like that I dragged my poor husband to Target and Hobby Lobby at least a billion times to find the perfect stockings. Now I have them, and the perfect throw pillows, and the perfect three-piece Dr. Suess’s The Grinch wall prints, and the perfect placemats, etcetera. And you know what? I love them all. Even though it’s just stuff, I worked hard for it, and I like it all enough that I want to keep it up as long as is reasonably possible so I can enjoy it.

Plus, I’m prone to laziness. Setting up and tearing down Christmas decorations is like, a full day if you’re doing the tree too, and I’d like to feel like I didn’t do all of that in vain.

Ultimately, do it however you want.

The first year I was married, I wanted to go crazy and start decorating before Halloween (I know, I’m better now) and my husband told me I needed to wait until after Thanksgiving. sadness ensued (more like me arguing because I’m very bad at giving in) My darling, in his typical loving fashion, brought me a tiny sled full of Christmas candies on November first, and thus, the very reasonable date was chosen to be the beginning of Christmas. You have to figure out what works for you. Personally, I believe Christmas decorations deserve two months, and you can’t stop me.

That is all.

P.s. Here is a post about emus, a post about sea sponges, and a post about Pidgin English