Christmas creep has been with us for a very long time—since the late 1800s, in fact. It has evolved from a late-Victorian habit of early shopping to a socialist attempt to tackle overtime and seasonal child labor, and finally to a strategic tool for retailers looking to cash in.
But it has accelerated significantly in recent years. According to a recent Financial Times article, Christmas in Britain this year arrived three weeks earlier than it did a decade ago. In practical terms, this means that in some shops Christmas displays appeared in August. In my native Greece, Christmas decorations appeared as early as early November for the first time ever. This follows an already established trend in America, where it is not unheard of for Christmas to overtake Halloween; the New York Times recently reported its first “Christmas in July.”
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Like with other creeping cultural phenomena, the difficult question is knowing what or who causes the trend. For while it may be straightforward to find the cause of an action by pointing to a particular mind behind it, when a phenomenon is so ubiquitous, where shall we look for the cause?
Are we, as in the everyday individuals, pushing for a Christmas that lasts months through our consumer choices, or are we being manipulated into an early Christmas and the resulting consuming profile? The survey behind the FT piece looks at both dimensions. On the one hand, it tracks when retailers begin stocking Christmas products; on the other, it compares when Britons start listening to Christmas hits. The first dimension points to the market economy, and here retailers seem to be the driving force. The second dimension points to individuals and a desire to inhabit an atmosphere and feel a specific mood.
Instead of trying to determine which factor comes first, we should understand how the two forces—the market and our individual desires—interact. Such puzzles have intrigued philosophers for a long time. In the 1800s, for example, the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel used the term Zeitgeist—the spirit of times—to refer to such ubiquitous and overlapping influences that operate across both macro and micro levels. The word Geist—also the German word for “ghost”— denotes precisely this diffuse character: it is everywhere and nowhere in particular.
But if what zeitgeist denotes are our most popular ideas and our social habits, then surely by changing those, we can change the spirit of our times. In other words, if most of us suddenly resisted the elongation of Christmas, by cutting back on gifts and decorations and festive songs, the effect would gradually wane just as it gradually waxed. In fact, Hegel thought that the Zeitgeist is not simply a reflection of the times but contains the seeds for overcoming a particular epoch and moving forward.
But no such overcoming seems to be happening yet. The creeping trend keeps creeping to the point that Christmas merchandise can be seen in the summer. But what is the problem with wanting Christmas to come earlier? Why not live in Christmas longer?
Because it is a form of escapism. And this may well be the link between a market that capitalizes on the Christmas spirit and individuals who yearn for Christmas songs in October.
Humans seem to have a deep-rooted desire to escape their present condition and seek solace in socially approved ways to pass the time. In his discussion of why humans find boredom so challenging, Martin Heidegger described this as a difficulty to be in the present, an anxious need to make the time pass, to forget our situation and move away from the present. Consider here how instinctively we reach for our phones when we face a few spare minutes.
Read More: Boredom Makes Us Human
Of course, we don’t need Christmas to escape the present; we already do it by thinking about our favourite Netflix series even when we are not watching it, by scrolling through our Instagram feed, by looking at clothes online, or by thinking of our next holiday destination.
But the Christmas spirit offers the perfect pre-packaged escape by ticking all escape boxes. It is as conventional and prescriptive as you can get; it comes with a reassuring set of social rituals, such as gifting, decorating, planning dinners, browsing for festive outfits. It fills our time with the corresponding tasks. And it offers a kind of time travel forward, the perfect way to pass the time and make it go faster (at least from August onwards).
In the modern Christmas spirit, the manipulative version of what the economist Adam Smith called the invisible hand of the market meets the human yearning for structured distraction. It is as seductive as it is numbing. There must be a better way forward. But finding it requires us to ask ourselves what Christmas is truly about.
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