Your Humble Blogger’s first Christmas Tree sighting of 2007 was on the ninth of November. Yes, it was in a commercial establishment, but a grocery store, not a gift store or such. Oh, it was one of the big grocery stores that also has wrapping paper and some decorations, but those have been on the shelves for weeks<\/I>.
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I was thinking. I’ve never chatted with anyone who expressed pleasure at the early- or even mid-November signs of the season. Everybody gripes. There are people who like to see the lights and garlands starting the day after Thanksgiving, and there are people who grumble at the whole thing (I am one, some years), but the pre-Advent Christmasification seems to be a source of universal gripe. I suspect that the employees of the store griped about putting it up, and gripe about looking at it, and I suspect the manager griped about it, too, and possibly the regional manager griped about sending out the memo on November first. But they did it.
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I do know that there must be people who really are happy about it. I just haven’t ever talked to one about it. This is likely because I don’t have a very wide range of acquaintance, so let me know if you think it’s wrong. Still, I see the griping in print, and there are lots of pop-cultural references to griping on this topic, and I haven’t seen any positive portrayals of early-Xmasers, although, again, I’m not really hep to that particular jive.
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Anyway, the aspect that I’ve been chewing on since that grocery store trip last Friday is that the free market system appears to have set up a competition where there is no particular drawback to being early, and at least the possibility of a substantial drawback to being late (compared to your competitors). It’s possible<\/I> that somebody will buy lights or wrapping paper at the grocer’s after being reminded by the tree that the Season is upon us. It’s plausible. It’s even likely. And I’m sure as hell not going to take my business elsewhere because of the tree, nobody is. I mean, even if I wanted to, what am I going to do, find the grocery stores that don’t<\/I> put up early Xmas decorations? Scout ’em all out until I find it? Pay the extra to shop at my local glatt kosher grocery? No. And YHB even has a local glatt kosher grocery, but if I wanted to shop there, I would already be doing it, and I’m not going to change my mind because of the Tannenbaum Express.
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No, the best thing for my grocer to do is make all his customers grumble and gripe. It’s an odd thing.
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Anyway, I was wondering if it’s possible to, simply by an act of will, decide to enjoy the pre-Veteran’s day Christmas decorations. Just to say to myself boychick<\/I>, says I, I am informal with myself because I’ve known myself since I was like that, boychick, there’s grumble and there’s glee. Choose glee.<\/I> And do it. Because they are pretty, you know, whatever else they are.
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Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In Which Your Humble Blogger doesn’t mention the upside-down trees, which were evidently Hot Stuff last year and even the year before, but which YHB only discovered last week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[196],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10733","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hatchet-job"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10733","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10733"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10733\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18164,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10733\/revisions\/18164"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10733"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10733"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}