The war against Christmas is over

...and Santa lives on... in space, gathering power! No, wait, scratch that... I'm not here to talk about that particular bit of Invader Zim fun (and oh yes, fun it is). Neither am I blogging about the eternal complaints about The Public not embracing/enduring your particular religion's usurpation of the Winter Solstice festivities (that includes you, Christians). No, this time I'm off on a rant about the other bastardization of a perfectly lovely holiday season, its commercialization and, especially, its creep.

Younger readers might not remember that, even though commercialism around the holidays has been pretty standard for decades, that there was a time, not so long ago, where it was at least contained... that is to say, Halloween might be exploited for a few weeks beforehand, at most a month, then Thanksgiving had its turn (with maybe a slight nod to Veterans Day), then, immediately after Thanksgiving, the Christmas shopping season ripped into high gear. In recent years, there's been a little bleed-over between the separate holidays, but the pattern in whole has held pretty true.

As of this year, Thanksgiving has apparently been demoted to near-Veterans Day status by the powers that be. I snickered a little at first when Qwest and Comcast started dueling Christmas-themed ad campaigns the day after the election, sure that their snowflake imagery would be bad for them, what with the number of people who dread the approach of snowfall and all. But the madness has continued to build... and today, I saw the clincher. I hit my local grocery store for supplies, and found Christmas growing healthily, if not in full bloom... extra toys scattered here and there, Christmas decorations throughout the "seasonal" area, and Christmas-themed DVDs at the checkstands. Mind you, in many places I might shrug it all off... but Thanksgiving, with its heavy ties to food, is a natural for a grocery store to be pushing... instead, I saw a few anemic turkeys at one end of the meat section, and that was about it.

It's sad, really... I mean, I know the economy's in the shitter, but the reaction of the merchandising world at large seems to be to push the need to consume even harder, and please ignore that "be thankful for what you've got" holiday entirely. I know I'm pretty well turned off by the crassness of the whole thing... hopefully, by the time I get around to doing my gift-buying, there will be somebody left that I won't mind buying from.