Christmas in March

Tonight I was in a grocery store.

Christmas music was playing in the background: instrumental renditions of "Rudolph," "Oh, Holy Night," and other mundane songs that we have to put up with for several months during the dark days of Winter.  

Hearing about the Great Hallmark Holiday and mommy kissing Santa Claus on the Ides of March was a very, very disturbing experience for me. 

I'm one of those terribly polite people who virtually never complain to managers or any staff about the quality of their business.  I've been served cold meals, wrong meals, over-charged, under-charged, and many glasses of expired beer;   I keep my mouth shut, for I forgive human beings for making honest mistakes.  

But tonight I was so disturbed by hearing Christmas music in March that I complained to the manager of the grocery store, and to two other employees.  The manager knew something was wrong.  The two regular employees didn't even realize that Christmas music was playing in the background. 

Perhaps I was so disturbed because hearing the music confirmed my scornful hypothesis that Christmas is starting earlier and earlier every year, so that profit-driven people make more money off of our dumb-asses that buy into Hallmark Holidays.   

When I was a child, you couldn't really do Christmas until Thanksgiving was over.  And now, the trivial sales and the 4/4 key-of-C songs start virtually in October.   I've been saying for years, (partially tongue-in-cheek) that Christmas will soon start even sooner, and in a couple of decades, it will be year-round.  My experience tonight in the grocery store confirmed my idea that some would call a paranoid delusion.  It was like an experience similar to what George Orwell must have felt had he been magically supplanted into 1984.

As always, this blog post is not *really* about hearing Christmas music in March.  It's about a deeper sociocultural problem.  Shall we discuss this further below?  :)