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It occured to me this morning, in that sort of half daze in which I get up and deal with the business of getting up and breakfasted, what the true meaning of Christmas is.
It's winter, dark most of the time, cold and miserable. Every culture since time began seems to have had some form of mid winter festival to look forward to and cheer them up with lots of food and drink and so on. Whatever you call it, whatever religion you claim is responsible for it, Christmas serves a purpose of stopping us all from killing ourselves and each other due to seasonal affective disorder. I think it largely does this very well... assuming you don't go insane from the preparations for it in the modern day. Which brings me to the other side of my discussion today.
It seems as if the preparations for Christmas seem to start earlier and earlier every year. Shops used to wait until after Halloween and Bonfire night before they even thought of putting up the decorations and the Christmas stock. Now many seem to have them up really early. There are also many decorations up in private houses already and you have to ask yourself, what happened to the tradition of putting them up on Christmas Eve and leaving them there for precisely 12 days?
So... opinions are requested. Do you think Christmas preparations are getting earlier each year or is it merely a biased perception in a 'summers used to be hotter when I were a lad' way? If it is getting earlier is this purely because of commercial market forces driving the consumers into an early panic buy or is it indicative of an inherent psychological sickness in the heart of civilisation - more and more are getting depressed earlier because of modern life stress and so need the panacea of the old fashioned midwinter yuletide feast earlier in the year?
Discuss....
It's winter, dark most of the time, cold and miserable. Every culture since time began seems to have had some form of mid winter festival to look forward to and cheer them up with lots of food and drink and so on. Whatever you call it, whatever religion you claim is responsible for it, Christmas serves a purpose of stopping us all from killing ourselves and each other due to seasonal affective disorder. I think it largely does this very well... assuming you don't go insane from the preparations for it in the modern day. Which brings me to the other side of my discussion today.
It seems as if the preparations for Christmas seem to start earlier and earlier every year. Shops used to wait until after Halloween and Bonfire night before they even thought of putting up the decorations and the Christmas stock. Now many seem to have them up really early. There are also many decorations up in private houses already and you have to ask yourself, what happened to the tradition of putting them up on Christmas Eve and leaving them there for precisely 12 days?
So... opinions are requested. Do you think Christmas preparations are getting earlier each year or is it merely a biased perception in a 'summers used to be hotter when I were a lad' way? If it is getting earlier is this purely because of commercial market forces driving the consumers into an early panic buy or is it indicative of an inherent psychological sickness in the heart of civilisation - more and more are getting depressed earlier because of modern life stress and so need the panacea of the old fashioned midwinter yuletide feast earlier in the year?
Discuss....
