There’s no slated time to start getting in the Christmas spirit, but there’s also no slated time to get into the Halloween spirit, or the Easter spirit, or the Thanksgiving spirit, and yet, people always get into Christmas way too early. Christmas commericals this year started November first. Halloween was barely over and Thanksgiving hadn’t even happened yet, and already people were going Christmas crazy. Christmas is wonderful, fantastic, and fun time of year, but too much of a good thing is bad. Don’t waste all your Christmas spirit on November; you’ll be sick of it by the time December rolls around.

Christmas music is the first, foremost, and worst offender of overuse. Christmas music is wonderful to listen to; it’s cheerful and festive, but, like any type of music, it gets old. There’s only so many times a person can listen to any song before they get tired of it, and “White Christmas” is no exception. Being bombarded twenty-four-seven by the same dozen songs sung by a dozen different people only serves to annoy. By the time Christmas comes around “Jingle Bells” is the new “Call Me Maybe”.

Christmas shopping, however, should be done early, if only to avoid the terror that is Black Friday. There’s nothing more terrifying than a soccer mom coming at you with a shopping cart. Presents should always be bought early; avoiding the last minute rush is key. Christmas trees, however, should be left until December. There’s nothing weirder than the family with a Christmas tree on Thanksgiving.

One thing that should always wait until December are the decorations. Putting up Christmas decorations in November leaves your neighborhood in a weird November limbo. There will be houses with leftover skeletons and half hearted graveyards still up, houses with blinding Christmas lights and reindeer, and then there’ll be that one house that actually decorated for Thanksgiving. Decorations should be left for their own season, including Christmas. People should have the corpses put away by December, and it’s just odd to see St. Nick and Jason Voorhees on the same street.

All in all, celebrating Christmas should be left until December; the actual Christmas season. Everybody likes Thanksgiving, especially Thanksgiving dinner, so take it one holiday at a time. Christmas is fantastic, but don’t forget that there’s an entire holiday season in between Halloween and Christmas. Thanksgiving even has its own Peanuts special, and anything Charlie Brown celebrates, we should all celebrate.