Opinion: Christmas’ invasion into November

For holiday lovers, I presume that the seasons of fall and winter are held near and dear to your heart. The cooling weather with crisp warm toned leaves falling from the trees. Pavement becomes cold and slick from seasonal showers and the air bites your skin as it moves breezes turning into sharp winds. This time of the year is home to Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, and New Years. Halloween keeps to itself as its own separate season, commonly known as spooky season, while Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, and New Years remain unaffected by changes in festive trends. 

Meanwhile Thanksgiving and Christmas are seemingly butting head to head, competing from space on the holiday timeline. Both are similar in nature, boasting themes of gratitude and love, commonalities within the festive spirit. They both include feasts of food, and for some, vacations to far away places or visits with family and friends. Yet over time, there has grown to be one striking difference between these two holidays – Thanksgiving seemingly lasts for one day, a week at most, while Christmas is seemingly celebrated from the day after Halloween until New Years.

This can most evidently be seen through Mariah Carey’s influence over the seasons through her annual defrosting, as she breaks out of her ice and is revived for the Christmas season. She is sometimes known to be the queen of the Christmas season since her hit song, “All I Want for Christmas is You.” According to a report from the New York Post in an article by Diario AS, “she makes around three million dollars every year from the song.”

In addition to this, she posted a video on YouTube celebrating the start of Christmas on Nov. 1, singing, “It’s time.”

Not only this, but the expansion of Christmas into the domain of November, which has traditionally been reserved for Thanksgiving is directly tied to the commercialization of the holidays. According to Wharton Women , “In 2021, US holiday shopping generated 886.7 billion dollars in sales, a 14 percent increase from the previous year.”

In addition to this, in relation to the sales on food, Blue Book Services states that, “Thanksgiving provided an enormous $2.8 billion sales lift in 2022… surpassed only by the Christmas sales lift of $6.2 billion”.

From this it is evident that Christmas brings in a substantially larger amount of money as compared to Thanksgiving. Large corporations are lengthening their selling seasons for holidays in order to increase their revenues as it gives consumers larger periods of time to buy products. Seeing that Christmas had consistently surpassed Thanksgiving in sales, it makes sense that the selling period of Christmas has extended past the month of December. 

But this has greater implications, past numbers and sales. As pop culture and businesses seek to push Christmas further into November to benefit their profits and sales, society as a whole begins to feel the effects of such, as we see many people beginning Christmas festivities immediately following Halloween. So, it can be said that Christmas has “successfully” invaded November, pushing Thanksgiving further and further into the shadows of festive holiday competition.