The countdown to Christmas has officially started. The famous Coca Cola advert has been spotted as early as the 11th of November, almost 60 days before the big day it self, but it’s the accepted sign that Christmas is surely on its way. The heart melting John Lewis advert has also been aired sprinkling sentimentality over living rooms throughout the country and the X Factor stars have sung their hearts out in the M&S Christmas advert too. But has Christmas come a bit too early this year?
Increasingly so, it seems Christmas come round all too fast. Selfridges in London opened their Christmas shop this year on August the second and reported good trade, selling 10,000 baubles in just their first week!
But really? August? I was still hopelessly wearing shorts and eating ice lollies shivering in hope of a ray of sunshine in our poor excuse of summer this year. Halloween and Bonfire Night wasn’t even out of the way before they were whacking out the tinsel and Heston Blumenthal was going on about his pine scented mince pies on the Waitrose advert. The leaves hadn’t even started falling yet! What happened to the good old ‘twelve days of Christmas’!?
If anything, the adverts seem to cause a cue for mothers to become erratic, fathers to be dragged round the high street for a spot of October time Christmas shopping and kids to start planning a mammoth list of what they want from Father Christmas this year.
Supermarkets are already groaning under the weight of mince pies and Christmas puddings. Most of which will have probably gone well past their sell by date way before the 25th of December. Shiny purple Quality Street tins line the stores perimeters like tinsel and the sight of neatly lined up Bailey’s bottles everywhere are enough to get you at least a tiny bit tipsy. I might start stocking up on Rennie Soft Chews now if I was you.
Don’t get me wrong , I love Christmas. It’s the one day of the year when you don’t mind getting up at six in the morning screaming the house down while running towards the Christmas tree at a dangerous speed, wearing that awfully itchy knitted jumper, eating enough food to make you feel sick, and then carry on eating. It’s great. But part of its charm is that it comes once a year.
You’ve religiously used you’re advent calendar counting down each day getting increasingly more and more excited, but just imagine a sixty day advent calendar? You wouldn’t want your Christmas dinner with all the trimmings after that amount of chocolate!
I just think Christmas used to be a break from the monotony of the cold, wet, winter season. A warming thought that, at the end of the tunnel, there was going to be multicoloured fairy lights to give you hope, but it seems Christmas may quickly becoming the monotony and we’re all in danger of becoming a bit of a Scrooge. So I say ‘Bah humbug’ to Maria Carey blaring out of shops as early as November, but come December the 1st she’s going to be on repeat all day long telling me all she wants for Christmas is me for a good twenty five days.
