As we reach single digits in the countdown until Halloween, all I seem to see is Christmas and winter. Halloween products and gifts are already off the shelves, with loads of winter colors and displays replacing them. I’m constantly asking myself: why do we skip the rest of the fall?
Especially with the warmer weather recently, fall didn’t really start until a couple of weeks ago. Why are we so eager to look past it? From working in retail for four years now, I’ve learned the answer — it’s all about money. The sooner the Christmas products get put out, the sooner customers will buy them. Halloween, Christmas, and many other holidays have been morphed into marketing ploys. Companies know that customers look for gifts and decorations early, and they want to be the first to provide those.
In my retail store, we’re almost finished with the plans in our holiday merchandising guide. It’s odd to look at How the Grinch Stole Christmas on the other side of the Halloween Games fixture. Soon, the awful renditions of popular holiday music will turn on and we’ll all be forced to listen. The crazy thing about all of this is that people are actually buying it! The reason commercialization works so well is because people are so easy to sell to and convince. All companies need to do is make a sale look enticing, and the internet will do the rest.
Since we live in the digital age, all it takes is one video or review for a very large amount of people to know about something. I constantly see common products selling out across the country because someone found it on TikTok and made a video about it. The same thing is happening with the holiday season; everyone wants to start earlier because of the media they consume about it, so they’re giving their business to these places that play the game.
Sometimes I feel as if the fall/winter holidays aren’t individual, but one big event stretched out over two months. Thanksgiving doesn’t even get its proper attention anymore, since many start decorating for Christmas on November 1st. This might be a hot take, but I start to think about Christmas on Black Friday and never before. Fall is my favorite season, and I would hate to think about the cold and snow that winter brings while it’s still so nice.
Whether you like to stretch out the holidays or not, one thing can be agreed on: the over-commercialization needs to stop. Holidays have strayed so far from what they’re really about – which is to spend time with friends and family. Not everything needs to be made into a profit, and I hope that one day we can collectively understand that to have a more authentic holiday season.