It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas

Image courtesy of Good House Keeping.com

By MaggieMae Dethlefsen

Christmas comes around once every year, yet everyone starts celebrating it at different times. Some say before Halloween, some say only in December, but personally I believe that it is okay to start celebrating Christmas starting November 1st. The start of November is the perfect time, falling between the end of Halloween and the beginning of the chilly weather season. 

If you start celebrating before Halloween it is just too early. Three months of listening to Christmas songs, watching Christmas movies, and getting into the Christmas spirit is just too long. If you celebrate for too long it ceases to feel special and magical. 

This also gives you the opportunity to fully celebrate Halloween, a holiday that acts like the ‘eve’ to the Christmas season. Halloween has its own music, movies, and customs that go along with it that do not blend well with Christmas; the spooky and the festive are not reconcilable. We even hear some radio stations start the countdown to Christmas the day after Halloween, when they start playing Christmas music. Halloween also has a season just like Christmas. People prepare and build up to the actual day of Halloween by putting themselves in the mood and wanting to get into the spirit of Halloween. 

In my opinion, there is no real Thanksgiving ‘season’. The holiday is celebrated for one day and you prepare for it the day of as well. Though Thanksgiving is a good holiday, it does not have the same media and culture that surrounds it. There is no music that accompanies it specifically, and you really only watch A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, which is generally only watched on the day of the celebrations. Everyone probably has traditions that they do on the actual day but there are no activities that you really go to before Thanksgiving to get into the Thanksgiving spirit. 

From the start of November, though, we see that everyone starts preparing for Christmas. Stores start decorating, Starbucks brings their holiday drinks out, and streaming services start advertising their Christmas movies as suggestions. We even see that the Macy’s Day Parade is Christmas themed and every year has Santa Claus make an appearance at the end, showing that even on the day of Thanksgiving, we do not prioritize it and celebrate Christmas more anyway. Thus, the perfect time to start celebrating Christmas is November 1st.