It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas.

BUT WHY????  


Here we are, still days away from Halloween, and major retailers everywhere are already preparing for the holiday season.  While the isles of the stores are still cluttered with drooping rubber masks and sacks of candy shaped like pumpkins and bats and all that fun spooky shit, the trees and ornaments are coming in on the loading docks and going straight to shelves and display windows.  And before the clock even strikes midnight on October 31st, Christmas angels and nativity scenes will be rushed into every vacant seasonal spot, next to the deeply discounted slutty cop outfits and unrealistic knives leaking fake blood, creating a veritable nightmare before Christmas the likes of which Tim Burton himself could not rival (though perhaps he could remake it with Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter in the lead roles).

But it's not the cheap glowing panties next to baby Jesus that really bothers me.  What really bothers me is the relegation of the any sort kindness or generosity of "the Christmas spirit" to the few days leading up to December 25th.  The first weekend of October, it was kind of cold out and I gave a homeless man a handful of change.  I couldn't help but think to myself, "Hm. This feels a lot like Christmas."  It's almost as though if the opportunity to help isn't gift-wrapped and dropped into a persons lap, then the need isn't even there.  I would gladly suffer through hearing a thousand and one renditions of the public domain classic, "Carol of the Bells," and even "Feliz Navidad," (yes, "Feliz-fucking-Navidad") all throughout the year if even a small bit of the whole good-will-toward-men mentality of Christmas lasted year-round as well.

I guess this year, when the bells start ringing, and Jose Feliciano starts singing, maybe everyone could just try to look at it as a good time to start being nice, instead of a good time to save 20% on Tickle-Me-Elmos.  In the meantime, I'm saving up all of my spare change for some discounted Halloween Captain Crunch.  Those ghosts turn the freakin milk green.  Awesome.