For. The love. Of God.
It's Wednesday, Nov. 1.
It's only one day after Halloween.
It's still four full weeks until Thanksgiving.
I just saw a commercial for Christmas decorations.
For the love of God.
I mean, c'mon, people! Seriously. It's barely November. What happened to Thanksgiving? What happened to Turkey Day? What happened to cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie and the Macy's parade and all that wonderful stuff that makes us fall asleep during the football games? It's like the retail world exists in an alternate dimension, and in that dimension - brace yourselves - there is no Thanksgiving.
I shudder to think of it.
If I think really hard and concentrate on my early childhood, I can just barely remember a time when the stores at least waited until Thanksgiving to advertise for the Christmas season. But things have gotten different over the years. Things have - changed.
Like a glacier creeping toward a Pleistocene village, advertising began a slow, almost sinister creep into the sacrosanct, holiday-free time before Thanksgiving.
At first it was just the day or two before, an ad here and there for Christmas items featured in the after-Thanksgiving sales. But no one noticed. No one spoke up. The advertisers grew bolder.
It only took a few years for the takeover to be complete. A few saw it coming and tried to warn the rest of us, but we didn't listen. We never listen. We either dismissed these prophets of doom as overwrought, over-worried fussbudgets or, when they pointed to the holly-bedecked window displays and spinning singing Santa Clauses and made that "Huh? Huh?" noise people make when they're trying to emphasize a point, just shrugged and walked away.
Why? Why did we walk away? Why, God, why?
Now stores stock seasonal stuff in September, and the Pilgrims count themselves lucky if Wal-Mart slaps a vinyl decal of them on the sliding doors for a couple days. There's the obligatory grocery store insert ad featuring Tom Turkey begging you to eat ham this year, but that's usually about it.
I say: Enough is enough.
We should do more, as a nation, to commemorate the great Thanksgiving holiday.
That's why I propose that, starting today, we all give Turkey Day the same build-up we give to Christmas. Corn shocks on every street corner. Pilgrim hats on every fire hydrant.
And remember those turkey drawings we made in kindergarten by tracing around our hands and drawing a beak on the thumb and coloring in the fingers? Yeah, those. I want those taped to every flat surface we can find. If everyone here on campus makes a couple hundred or so, we can have this whole place papered inside of a week.
It'll be great.
And at the very least, it'll maybe block out some of the Christmas cheer that's elbowed its way into November. There's not much we can do to counter Madison Avenue, but if we all band together, we might be able to fight back in a small yet significant way.
But if I hear carols over the PA system any time within the next two weeks, I'm moving to Fiji.
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