I am sure you are familiar with the Christmas Creep phenomena. You can’t miss it!
The basic principle of Christmas Creep is that each year Christmas celebrations begin earlier and earlier.
The cynical view is that retailers use the earlier Christmas season to maximize sales. I can’t imagine that works very well. People are going to buy a certain number of gifts, no matter when they start seeing Christmas displays. Right? For more on Christmas Creep read the Wikipedia article here.
There are some holdouts. The contrast between the holdouts and the creepers is evident at the nearby outdoor mall – The Grove.
A few nights ago the “tree” at The Grove was lit in a fireworks display. That is, the sunday before Thanksgiving the Christmas tree was lit.
While this was going on the mall’s Nordstrom displayed the following. I think it gives us a better clue into understanding Christmas Creep.
There is another theory. That is the Unified Theory of Creep. Created by Gregg Easterbrook of ESPN.com, The Unified Theory of Creep assumes that all things eventually creep. You can see it applied in this TMQ article from Easterbrook (scroll down a bit).
According to this theory, it cannot be consumerism that drives creep. It must be something else. The Nordstrom notice tells us everything we need to know.
“We just like the idea of celebrating one idea at a time.” – Nordstrom
The problem is that most people are looking for the “next thing”. People have such a hard time living in the moment and enjoying where they are in life that they miss everything.
In elementary school you just want to get to high school and in high school you just want to get to college and once in college you just want a job and when you get a job you want to find a spouse and when you get married you want to start a family and then you can’t wait until you can get the kids ino school and then college and then retire and then…
You see, we all look to next thing. But living in the moment will give us so much more pleasure. There won’t be a struggle to wait until the next thing, we will just enjoy where we are.
The Unified Theory of Creep is the theory of impatience, of not living in the moment, of yearning for the next thing. Nordstrom has the right idea. Enjoy things one at a time.
I think marriages suffer from this as well. Men looking for their next wife without enjoying the wife they already live with. I think childhood has suffered from this as well. Parents are preparing their children so well to be adults, that they somehow miss out on childhood.
The Jewish idea is clear. We have a halachic principle. “Ein me’arvin simcha b’simcha” – we do not mix one occasion with another occasion. When are we supposed to begin preparations for a holiday? The talmud says 30 days.
The Jewish idea is to cherish where we are at any given moment and time. Not to seek the next moment or occasion.
Nordstrom got it right.
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Thank you for this post. I remember thinking about this when I was still in High School, but not knowing the cause or understanding the effects.