I'm Jason Toon, and like my heroes from Johnny Cash to Pee-Wee Herman, I'm putting on my own Christmas special! Only instead of a variety show, it's a month of hall-decked, figgy-puddinged holiday editions of Shoddy Goods, the newsletter from Meh about the stuff people make, buy, and sell. So, not like those other ones at all, I guess. Anyway, this week, I look at one of the most cherished cliches of the seasonal cynic to see if there's any truth in it… "Every year merchants, whose ears perk at the jingle of coins when most people aren't even thinking about jingle bells yet, have been bent on making the Christmas season come earlier," complains one commenter. “Christmas doesn’t only seem to come earlier every year,” says a saleslady in Los Angeles. “It actually does."
You might be wondering when exactly this vanished era was, when Christmas sales started at the "right" time. So was I. Taking potshots at SantaMusic was objectively better when I was a teenager. Young people these days are lazier, more pampered, and less respectful. And Christmas keeps getting earlier every year. The first two of those tropes have been mocked and discredited. Every generation has to endure them, and then hurls them at later generations in turn. But is there any reason to believe the third one is any more valid? I wanted to find out. Not if people feel like Christmas starts earlier than when they were young - obviously they always do - but what the evidence shows.
So it's a profit deal… the editors of the Boca Raton News bust the racket wide open, November 21, 1984. Both unearthed some gems along the lines of the quotes I found at the start of this article. “Some of us will become so tired of seeing Santa hanging around weeks on end we’ll be taking pot shots at him,” Black quotes a Cincinnati Enquirer editorial from 1944. If you're interested in this subject at all, both of those pieces are fun reading (after you finish this one, of course). So yeah, there's always been some Christmas hucksterism before Thanksgiving, and some people saying it didn't used to be like this. But that doesn't really answer the question about whether there's been a general trend over the decades where "Christmas starts earlier every year." Can we turn those anecdotes into data?
The good old days weren't 1944, according to this November 9 ad from the Omaha Papillon-Times. Run run (the numbers), RudolphI'm no scientist, and what follows isn't exactly science. But I do have a newsletter to fill, so I'll take a shot at it. Collins and Black were on the right track, I thought. Newspapers were as central to people's lives during the 20th century as the Internet is today, with the added advantage of being centrally archived and searchable in a way online content will never be. They're the closest thing to a time machine we have. I may not be able to ask people in the past what's on their minds, but I can rely on thousands of editors and advertisers whose jobs depended on knowing their audience. So I went to my beloved Newspapers.com and started searching - not just to dig up more counterexamples, fun as that is, but to add up search result volumes for "Christmas", week-by-week, from October 24 right up to Christmas. I quickly realized, whoa, the past has a lot of different dates. Rather than look at every year in the Newspapers.com database, going back to the 1700s, which might take me the rest of my natural life, I'd look at every ten years from 1904-2004. That gives us snapshots through a nice, round century. It spans the dawn of modern Christmas as we know it through the early social media age. And it should cover the memories of everyone alive today, their parents, and most of their parents' parents. Also, just comparing years' raw totals to each other was too noisy, too dependent on how many newspapers were published and archived, and thus on factors like depression and war. So I decided I'd set the number of results for the week leading up to Christmas to 1, and figure each week as a percentage of that. Basically, this would show us how steep - or not - the ramp-up to Christmas was for each year.
See that blue line at the bottom? That's 1904. And then the little cluster of lines above it is the next three decades: 1914, 1924, and 1934. Every year after that is then clustered together right around the 25 percent mark for that first week. But what about the last 20 years?On the one hand, I don't know. Since the early 2000s, newspapers have become less reliable barometers of the public mind. There are fewer of them, they're smaller in both circulation and page count, they're less influential, and far fewer of them are centralized and searchable. On the other hand, is there a good reason to believe it might have changed? "It just seems like it" isn't a good reason. We've just seen how it has "seemed like" Christmas was perpetually getting earlier when it wasn't. Google Trends doesn't measure the same thing as my little newspaper survey, but if anything, "Christmas" search volume shows an even later "start" to the season. OK, there's the sprawl of Black Friday into a November-long event. But have you noticed how rarely you see any Christmas iconography associated with it anymore? Or even gifting imagery? It's become its own weird artificial retail occasion, a reason to splurge on yourself as much as a Christmas thing. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, I'm more inclined to think that the "Christmas gets earlier every year" trope is about as true as it has been for the last 80 years: not really at all. So why does it still carry the force of unquestioned truth for so many people? Is it just another nostalgic belief that everything in the past was more pure and honest? Is it our tendency to give undue weight to things that violate our expectations? One Santa Claus in September is worth a thousand Santas in December, in terms of memorability. The truth is, when there's money to be made, there will always be somebody trying to get the jump on grabbing it first. But the very persistence of the complaint undermines its own case. Clearly, most of us dislike the idea of Christmas creep so much, we're hypervigilant, ever ready to loudly damn any sign of it. Retailers hear this and tread lightly. Perpetuating the myth of too-early Christmas might be the best way to keep it a myth.
Retailers have their own schedule for when to pitch us on the holidays, but, if you celebrate Christmas, what’s your rule for when it’s ok for the decorations to go up? Personally, we go pretty early - indoors, often the week before Thanksgiving. But I try to hold back a bit longer for the outside decorations. Honestly, though, once it starts getting dark early, all bets are off for anything I can do to get some extra light and festivity going. And you don’t want to know how late we leave everything up. Join us in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat to discuss holiday timing and when exactly “the good old days” were. —Dave (and the rest of Meh) This season, give yourself the gift of professional-grade infotainment with these past stories from Shoddy Goods, because they're free and you're worth it:
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