As I walked into the store last Thursday evening, just a little less than a week before Halloween, I energetically was on a mission to find decorations, candy and all sorts of things for the 31st.
Immediately upon entering the store, however, green, red and white colors flooded the aisles with Christmas decorations galore. Snow globes, stockings, reindeers, Santa Claus, Christmas trees, ornaments—you name it, it flooded each section at the front of the store.
What about the Halloween section? It was piled up in a corner with product stacked on top of product, done in a seemingly lackluster way. It felt like the company wanted to suck the life out of Halloween and bring Christmas to the forefront to fill their pockets.
It begs the question, where have the fall holidays gone? It wasn’t even November yet and stores already want to jump on the Christmas season without a care in the world.
Corporate America saw that Halloween is a short-lived payout and Thanksgiving doesn’t rack in any bucks, so they need to hit Christmas—the goldmine of them all—extremely early.
The sight of the early Christmas decorations and embellishments took me back to my days working at the outlet mall. For three years, working there as a sales associate and a stock room boy, I dreaded the holiday season for many reasons, and this reaffirmed my weary spirit for the holiday season because of corporations feeding off the public’s pockets.
It reminded me of the empty feeling when our bosses told us that under no circumstances could we excuse ourselves from working on Black Friday, which mostly came after Thanksgiving dinner. We also had to make our schedules more available during the weeks leading up to Christmas, and usually had to work Christmas Eve.
It reminded me of the distant feeling I would have toward the holiday season whenever it would roll around. Even though I felt I was working long, hard hours, the payoff never felt enough to the sacrifice missing family time around the Christmas season, like decorating the Christmas tree, different Christmas events around town or normal gatherings.
And most of all, it reminded me how greedy people can get during the season. One instance comes to mind when I first think about the greed, and it was of a woman who walked into my store at the about two days before Christmas. She was frantically in search of a present for her son, who was coming home for the holidays from college. She needed a particular size in a certain jacket that was both stylish and affordable.
When our product didn’t meet her requirements and after a good while of trying to assist her, I remember her yelling at me, “You guys are pathetic! I can’t believe how horrible I’ve been treated here.”
She stormed out of our store in a frenzy, and it really stuck with me how that moment reflected the way holidays impact people on a emotional level.
Rushing toward Christmas has taken away the integrity of how special some of the fall holidays truly are. This holiday season, my personal resolution is to spend less time stressing about who to please with gifts and allocate more time toward spending it with those I love.
