Wednesday evening, I had occasion to visit a nearby mall. I expected to see Halloween decorations in the stores. What I didn’t expect to see was one store that had Halloween decorations and items on sale that was in the process of putting out Christmas decorations and items.
When I was a child, I don’t remember seeing Christmas decorations going up before Thanksgiving. It’s possible that I just didn’t notice, but I doubt that, because I remember the arrival of the Sears and Montgomery Wards Christmas Catalogs being A Big Thing. We’d go page-by-page through the catalogs, trying to put together our wish lists.
A web search tells me that it is popularly known as Christmas Creep, and I had no idea it was getting quite so bad. I knew that one of the forces driving it is the fact that many retailers do most of their business in the lead to Christmas, but how long will it be before Christmas shopping season is a year-round phenomenon?