Everyone has that annoying friend that listens to Christmas music year round. But lately, that friend has become corporate America. Hallmark stores set ornaments on the shelf in July. Walmart displays their Christmas trees mid-September. Target sets out all of these things before Halloween. Why do we as a society feel the need to do this?

The original reasoning behind Black Friday begins with an old accounting custom. When businesses were still new and in debt, bookkeeping was done in red ink. When businesses finally started making money, they wrote in black ink. Black Friday was started as a day when stores would hold sales to attract customers and make enough money to be “in the black”. But it seems that in recent years, Black Friday has become a way for businesses to push the Christmas season before it’s necessary.

Some people may still consider this ideal since it is the day after Thanksgiving. However, Twitter seems to have decided that Christmas begins November 1st.

The minute Halloween ended, people began tweeting about the “first day of Christmas”, holiday shopping, and Mariah Carey’s hit song “All I Want for Christmas is You.” However, another side of Twitter has been bashing stores for setting out decorations before Labor Day.

This Christmas propaganda also seems to appear in stores earlier each year. Walmart set up its first Christmas display on August 28th of this past year,  two weeks earlier than last year. Taking into consideration the fact that this will get dramatically earlier as the years pass, and that stores will naturally want to outshine their competitors by setting up their Christmas displays even earlier, if this trend continues, fairly soon we’ll be seeing Christmas sales before back-to-school promotions.  

Christmas may be “the most wonderful time of the year,” but it’s simply unreasonable to celebrate the Christmas season before December. Christmas is already pushed enough during the weeks leading up to it, and adding a few extra months to that is enough to spoil the holiday.