Christmas: When’s right to start celebrating?

In America, we get quite keen about Christmas. Tradition will tell you that in the States, Christmas decorating starts the day after Thanksgiving. In reality, you might as well just slap a turkey on top of your Christmas tree and call it a day.

At the risk of sounding like a Grinch, Americans tend to jump the gun a bit on Christmas merriment. There are other holidays that consume prime autumn time slots, and to be honest, the overlap in celebration can be overwhelming. I don’t need to see chocolate Santa’s creepily lurking behind bags of Halloween candy in grocery stores, nor do I care to carve pumpkins with Michael Buble’s Christmas album playing in the background.

That’s one of the reasons I was so excited to hop across the pond for uni– to avoid the Thanksgiving turkey-trots that get in the way of putting up Christmas trees and icicle lights. That being said, you can imagine my surprise at finding out that in the UK, decorating for Christmas is taboo until the 1st of December.

What happens in Britain for that nearly month-long wait between Guy Fawkes Day and December 1st? I mean, pip pip, cheerio and all that, but do you all just drink tea and watch the leaves change? There are lights to be strung, wish lists to be made, and The Other Guys singles to be downloaded. Americans get all this done in between mashing potatoes and standing in line for Black Friday sales. It’s just culturally understood that if your Christmas tree isn’t up by the first week of December, you’ve failed at Christmas.

It seems to me that Britain is severely under-utilizing the significant head-start that it gets on the Christmas season. You don’t have to wait for the IRN-BRU advert to kick-start your Christmas cheer; get yourself to Paperchase, buy some baubles, and get ready to party like it’s 4 B.C.

Are you Scandinavian, German, Iranian, Brazilian, Peruvian, South African, Japanese or anything else? Or maybe you don’t celebrate Christmas? Tell us what you think about all this celebrating.