I’m not sure I’ve ever known the yuletide season to start so early (Picture: Getty Images)
Bonfire Night is barely over and already Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas has re-entered the charts, the supermarket aisles are full of festive food, and Stacey Solomon has started putting up her tree and decorations.
Call me a grinch, but it just doesn’t seem right.
As a child of the 80s, the build-up to the festive season looked worlds away from what it is today.
My sister and I used to go to bed on Christmas Eve with not a hint of Christmas in the house.
Come the following morning though, our house had been turned into a regular winter wonderland.
There would be a tree twinkling with fairy lights in the corner of the living room, foil coloured decorations draped from the ceiling, and bowls of Quality Streets and nuts dotted around the sideboards.
Not to mention the smell of roasting turkey wafting through the house.
Yes, it must have been a near impossible mission for ‘Santa and his Elves’ to get all that done after my sister and I had gone to sleep. But the sense of true magic to come downstairs to that on Christmas morning will never leave me.
Over the years though things have changed and the Christmas festivities seem to start earlier each year. And 2023 seems to be no exception.
My sister and I used to go to bed on Christmas Eve with not a hint of Christmas in the house (Picture: Rachel Tompkins)
Whether it’s down to the soggy Summer, Autumn and Winter we’ve had, or a post-Covid legacy of people wanting to make up for lost festivities of Christmases of recent years, I’m not sure I’ve ever known the yuletide season to start so early.
In the space of just about a month we’ve had temperatures over 30 degrees and now we are full-steam ahead into Ho-Ho-hell.
But this year I’m taking a stand against this early Christmas madness, this consumerism gone crazy.
I’m saying a firm ‘no’ to spending and celebrating earlier than ever.
I learnt my lesson the hard way last year when I excitedly enlisted the help of my two boys, then aged nine and six, to help me put our Christmas tree and decorations up in November, just after fireworks night.
The whole family thought I had lost my mind at first. We usually put our tree up early to mid-December.
‘But it’s only November!’ they gasped, puzzled.
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