Before anyone has the chance to count their Halloween candies from trick or treating, the world seems to ignore Thanksgiving—jumping straight ahead to the winter festivities.
November is freshly upon us and yet stores are already blasting Christmas music and decorating with an abundance of holiday merchandise.
It’s honestly hard not to give in to the early celebration of the season, as Perry Como’s song “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas” said, it’s everywhere you go. Stocked holiday shelves with decorative wreaths and seasonal gingerbread flavored treats galore, the act of glazing over Thanksgiving and the middle of fall seems trivial—but really, have we lost sight of living in the present?
This pattern of yearning for the next big celebration or break is not limited to the fall and winter season, but all year round. In the summer, people crave cozying up with their hot cocoa, while in the winter, the exact opposite. When this comes from a place of personal excitement, people don’t realize that anticipation can also cause them to neglect the value of the present.
Social media has been a factor in this cycle, as many users romanticize different holidays for content. Even before Halloween concluded, my feed was flooded with influencers promoting Christmas wishlist ideas and showing off their aesthetic holiday decorations, drawing enthusiasm from users. Retailers have also started pushing winter catalog promotions earlier, putting pressure on consumers to purchase “the perfect holiday must-haves” and decorate their homes ahead of time. The hype built through this marketing makes it hard to keep up each season, as it feels we are constantly rushing from one holiday to the next in the span of the ‘ber months from October through December.
While some may argue that people enjoy celebrating the holidays early as intrinsic motivation to make it through the final home stretch of the year, who’s to say you can’t still enjoy the time left before the actual winter season comes around? There are so many things that make fall so enjoyable, going to harvest festivals, crunching red and orange leaves along the sidewalk, even because the weather is perfect to start wearing your UGG boots. Despite all of the Christmas and winter promotions around, we do not have to succumb to the pressure to skip straight ahead—there are so many fall festivities to indulge in as we near the season’s end.
Thanksgiving is an opportunity to come together to reflect on the things we are grateful for and the holidays are a sacred time; they aren’t meant to be materialistic, but an opportunity to spend time with family and friends. If we continue looking ahead, we may miss out on memories made in the present and the value of what we often take for granted, which is oftentimes right in front of us. Let’s hold off on decorating our Christmas trees just yet and take the time to slow down, the magic of the holidays lies in the current moments spent with those we cherish the most.
