How Creepy Is Christmas?

It's September 21th, 2011 - technically the first day of autumn. I say technically because the temperature is 91, the humidity is the reverse of that number at 19, the trees are full of leaves and no one is even talking turkey day. Little did I realize what horrors awaited me.

I'm at my local Costco store, doing my usual monthly run to stock up on consumables. My wife and I are strolling down one of four main lanes toward the back where they keep the food when my wife comes to a halt, a look of puzzlement on her face. The puzzlement is soon replaced by a growing realization that something is NOT RIGHT. Fear, terror and incomprehension war together as the awful, awful truth dawns.

"Oh my fucking god! Is that CHRISTMAS SHIT ALREADY?" she exclaims.

(Note: My wife spent a lot of years in the Navy. You get used to it from her. Seems somehow natural for her to talk that way, actually.)

What it's called is Christmas Creep.

Christmas Creep is the phenomenon of merchants to try to extend the Christmas shopping season by bringing out the wrapping and tinsel and plastic nativity scenes they couldn't sell last year earlier and earlier each successive year. It's purely secular and has nothing to do with religion. It also has everything to do with the bottom line.

While gift giving has been a long-standing tradition for all faiths, and the season (the winter solstice or the shortest day of the year) a time of celebration and feasting (and other actual atrocities which would make most people blanch), the whole commercialization of Christmas actually started in 1931 when the Coca Cola company commissioned a swiss ad agency to create a "Santa Claus" wearing a coke-emblem-red suit drinking a Coke to advertise their product.

The concept of Santa Claus goes back a long way, thanks in part to Christmas. But the idea of Christmas as a time to celebrate the birth of Christ was definitely contrived by the Catholic Church in an effort to bring pagans into the flock.

The Saturnalia was a Roman convention wherein the law was suspended for a week before the solstice. A single person from each village would be picked to fulfill the role of "enemy of Rome" and the embodiment of all that was bad. They were over-fed and forced to drink too much and tormented among much debauchery and lawlessness within the people. At the end of this celebration, this poor slob would be killed and the proceedings would be declared good since all lawlessness, bad behavior and whatnot went with him (or her) for a year. While over time they did away witl killing people, the general debauchery and lawlessness (or a suspension of morals - which in some places meant the same thing) continued. It was an immensely popular thing to do.

The Catholic church, seeing how beloved this celebration was, decided to call the solstice the day Christ was born. Originally they said it was on the 25, which several hundred years ago during the 4th century was when the winter solstice usually fell. Precession caused by the rotation of the earth has changed that to between the 20th and 22nd of December, usually on the 21st, so the day of "Christmas" and the solstice are no longer the same. But the celebrations continued and the Catholic church wanted new converts, so they came up with this excuse to keep a "time of celebration" in order to get them.

In consequence of this decision, Christmas time was also a time of when Jews were often abused in some way. In Rome, the pope was often watching in approval. This practice of abusing Jews during the Roman Saturnalia continued through the 19th Century.

This isn't exactly the "reason for the season".

Now, I talked about all this before some time ago, but that was more about religious use of public lands. The point is, without the Catholic church deciding that co-opting Saturnalia would be a great way to get more pagans, we'd probably not have much in the way of gift -giving as a seasonal thing. But it took an ad agency to popularize it.

Merchants never used to rev up for the Christmas season. Most of them were looking forward to the break. But after 1931, and the revamped Santa Claus born from the mind of an ad agency, the idea of a "Christmas shopping season" came into being. It was heavily promoted, of course, because selling things is what businesses do. If they could come up with an excuse to create this shopping season to drive up sales, then they would.

And they did.

The term "Black Thursday" was coined, originally, for the October 24th day in 1929 when the stock market crashed. The term "Black Friday" was coined to indicated the day after Thanksgiving when, usually for the year, the merchants broke even. All of the sales from that point on turned a profit for them.

So naturally, they wanted MORE profit, and the Christmas Shopping Season was created.

Being a good businessman, I see the shrewdness of the move and approve.

For decades, the Christmas Shopping Season started on Black Friday and ended on Christmas Eve. Before Thanksgiving, all you would see were Thanksgiving things. All that over the river and through the woods stuff to get you to Grandma's House and all the goodies for the Thanksgiving feast.

But about twenty years ago or so, things started changing. Christmas decorations started appearing BEFORE Thanksgiving. People commented on it, but did nothing. As time went on, those green, red, gold and silver decorations started appearing earlier and earlier. This year, they've made their earliest appearance ever.

This is Christmas Creep.

The concept behind the Christmas Shopping Season was to have a special time to buy special things for that special someone (or those special someones). But it's gone too far. Merchants want to get more profit because business sales are slow, people are looking for deals and low prices and margins are tighter than before. I get this.

The point is that by extending the Christmas Shopping Season, it dilutes its impact. The pace of shopping becomes relaxed, unhurried - and NOT very impulsive. Profits are generated by impulse shopping and the more of it the better. Too much selection is fine, but the price per unit is low and so is the margin. People who are unhurried are give TOO MUCH TIME to shop. They can compare prices, find the best deals, hunt down something in another store. In short they can find the most at the least profit to the merchants.

Consumers may be expecting this, and that may be why Christmas Creep is so awful this year. But times were bad before and Christmas Creep didn't happen then. The merchants have forgotten that they can buy fewer items, available over a shorter amount of time, generating increased demand, and therefore increased premium on the price.

Today, if a toy or item available at Christmas time is popular, EVERYONE HAS ONE. That completely undermines its unique qualities. If only a few have it, and a lot want it, that makes it much MORE special to those who have it. But if everyone has it, that detracts from its uniqueness, making it less valuable, and therefore unable to command a premium price.

It also creates a throw-away and very wasteful society at a time in human history when such acts will have some very long-term, negative repercussions for the entire species. If their toys are commonplace, they're treated as commonplace and tossed on a whim. When I was a kid, I never threw away my toys. They were hard to get, fun to play with and valuable in my eyes.

(Disclaimer: I knew these Christmas presents came from my parents from the age of 3. Never let a genius sit on the lap of a Santa billed as "the one and only Santa Claus" who is wearing a fake beard. Once I figured out Santa was fake, the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy were quickly filed into their proper mythological places.)

People need to appreciate what they get. If they don't, they treat things like crap. If everyone can get the Sparkly Pony with the Kung Fu Grip, then it's not special to them and that toy will find itself under the tires of the family car because they didn't care about it enough to bring it in with them when they were done playing.

Extending the holiday season may be how merchants are extending their profits, but to me, they're blowing a golden opportunity. Quantity will never return as much profit profit as quality. They need to stock only a limited number of things, and charge as much as the market will bear. If some folks can't afford it or get one due to limited supply, oh well. That's how life is. And disappointment in childhood often leads people to doing more and better in adulthood.

Kids need to learn about disappointment and how to handle it, and to appreciate the things they do get. It's a life lesson that's good not only for them, but for everyone in the long run.

And maybe we can de-creep the Christmas Creep.