You walk into your favorite department store to be greeted with a barrage of holiday cheer. Festive banners hang overhead, merry music plays through the speakers, and the place smells vaguely of peppermint. You open your phone, maybe to remind yourself why you came in the first place, and you see the date. October 25th. The winter holidays haven’t even begun to cross your mind, and yet they are already upon you.
This phenomenon, which was coined in the mid-1980s as ‘Christmas creep,’ is not a new occurrence by any means, but it seems to have intensified in recent years. Tess Venjohn, ‘26, works at the General Store of Minnetonka, and says that the store begins to roll out its Christmas season “mid-October, if not earlier,” and starts to play Christmas music “the second week in November.” These actions are mirrored in larger chain stores such as Target and Walmart, with Walmart offering its first Holiday Deals event of 2024 from October 8th-13th. Brooke Benson, ‘26, has also noticed that Christmas decor has been getting increasingly earlier, and calls it “weird.”
The feeling that the holiday season itself gets earlier and earlier every year isyear is spurred on by companies that want to sell as much as possible by capitalizing off of nostalgia, holiday charm, and the pressures of gift-giving. While the holiday season is not an inherently bad thing, it can be a very stressful time for some. The Christmas creep intensifies stress because it lengthens the number of weeks that customers are being bombarded with advertisements, deals, and the general pressure to buy as much as possible. The three-month span from October through December has been nicknamed the “golden quarter” by retailers, meaning it is the quarter in which they expect to make the most profit. They do this by purposefully manufacturing an environment in which you feel like you need to survey every website, visit every store, and buy every item from the smallest stocking stuffer to the perfect blowout gift. It’s also important to note that the internet has played a big part in the escalation of holiday consumerism- not even in your own home are you free from the pressure to go holiday shopping.
When the holiday season lasts for over two months, it can be harder to recognize the celebrations for what they are meant to be: enjoying the moments as they come, and maintaining a sense of true holiday spirit. However, this sentiment is not echoed by all. Venjohn is in favor of starting the holiday season early- she thinks that “we need to normalize [playing] Christmas music around Halloween.” The most important thing to keep in mind as the holiday season comes to a close, regardless of how you feel about it, is to take the time to appreciate every moment as it comes.
