Main Index of Articles
Suggestions on How to More Properly Celebrate
or Observe Christmas,
or to Market Respectfully for the Holiday Season
It is probably unrealistic, in view of the strong cultural currents and most people’s personal experience in the last two generations, to expect a strict adherence to the Church calendars when celebrating, observing, or even marketing Christmas. Nevertheless, there are steps that private persons, public venues, and even conscientious vendors, can take towards a more meaningful, or even just more respectful approach towards the Christmas Season.
For Vendors, the key is to promote wares without disrespecting other people’s proper observance of the season, or needlessly polluting the holiday experience with excessive early decorating and promotion that eventually becomes less effective anyway. Studies have shown that as the shopping season has grown longer, sales have become flatter during the season.
Prior to December 7, a respectful retailer should limit references to Christmas to signs and published advertisements. Preferably, outward decorations, that passersby cannot avoid should not appear before that day – and at minimum, not till AFTER Thanksgiving Day.
As for property management companies that have issues with coordinating decorating at more proper times, that is their problem. Somehow businesses managed in previous decades. Retailers, as their landlords’ patrons, are responsible in the long run for what their landlords do with their rent payments.
For individuals and families in their own homes, the effort should be to gradually restore the observance of Christmas to a more reasonable proportion of time that at least includes the actual season, that is less lock-in-step with the shopping period, and that includes activities separate from gift-giving. Scheduling holiday fun or ceremonial activities during the December 25 through January 6 period, free from the stress of shopping crowds and deadlines, should actually make things easier and may even bring unexpected satisfaction and benefits.
If your family currently finds itself way off the formal calendar, and familiarity and nostalgia make it difficult to change, a gradual approach is probably best. Delaying early family activities by two or three days a year, can painlessly put your family back into a more traditional observance period in five to seven years. For example, if the Christmas tree was bought on December 1 last year, this year buy it on December 4. And, regardless of when the tree goes up, one could place the star above the Christmas tree, or adding some other symbolic decoration on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day to officially mark the formal start of the season.
Public Venues like business lobbies, government offices, and hotels have no business purpose or reason for putting up decorations early, if at all. The most common reason today for the ever-earlier decorating is simply the creeping ignorance of the proper period. If they are to decorate, then they should do so at a more appropriately respectful time. In Holland, Christmas decorations are actually prohibited prior to December 7, due to their desire to protect another holiday that takes place on that day. Delaying until at least a few days after Thanksgiving Day, showing respect for the idea that Thanksgiving Day is not a Christmas Shopping Kick Off day, would be a step in the right direction.
The Lost Twelve Days of Christmas
Copyright 2008, The Ultrapolis Project
Except where noted, articles may be freely copied and reprinted with proper credit given to source.