Can We Please Let Autumn Happen?

It is September 16.

September. Sixteenth.

It is technically still summer.

Astronomical fall doesn’t even begin until September 22 this year. Winter doesn’t begin until December 21.

And apparently some of you are already putting up Christmas trees.

I have friends doing this.

Now, I want to be absolutely clear: I will defend your right to put up your Christmas tree whenever you want. It is your house. It is your tree. It is your electricity bill.

If putting up a Christmas tree while it is technically still summer brings you joy, have at it.

But freedom works both ways.

I will also defend my right to point at you and make fun of you.

Because, seriously.

Can we please let autumn happen first?

I Haven’t Even Bought My Pumpkin Yet

Stores have been creeping Christmas earlier and earlier for years, and social media certainly isn’t helping. Someone posts a video of their beautifully decorated Christmas tree, somebody else sees it and gets inspired, and suddenly we’re collectively skipping ahead three months.

I haven’t even bought my pumpkin yet.

The pumpkins are grown. They’re ready. I just haven’t had the chance to go pick one out, put it on the porch and properly enjoy the fact that autumn is arriving.

And somehow Christmas has already passed me in the fast lane.

I like fall.

I like watching the leaves change. I like pumpkins. I like apple cider. I like those first cool evenings after a hot summer. I like Halloween.

And yes, I like Thanksgiving.

Remember Thanksgiving?

It’s that holiday retailers occasionally acknowledge somewhere between the Halloween clearance aisle and the 12-foot inflatable Santa Claus.

Thanksgiving gets particularly cheated by this rush toward Christmas. There’s plenty of cookware and turkey-shaped serving dishes, but compared with the mountains of Halloween and Christmas merchandise, finding actual Thanksgiving decorations can sometimes feel like an archaeological expedition.

We go from skeletons to Santa Claus with a turkey briefly running across the road in between.

Maybe we could just enjoy the turkey for a minute.

And while we’re at it, I don’t want Winterfests in the middle of autumn either.

Winter will get here. I promise.

We do not have to drag it forward on the calendar just because somebody figured out how to sell more lights that way.

And I Say This as a Capitalist

I believe in the free market.

And I think it is worth making a distinction here, because a free market and consumerism are not the same thing.

A free market is about choice: people are generally free to produce, sell, buy or decline to buy goods and services through voluntary exchange.

Consumerism, in the sense I’m talking about here, is the cultural pressure to keep buying, consuming and replacing things—and increasingly to turn every event, season and holiday into another opportunity to sell us something.

I can support the first without celebrating the second.

If a store wants to sell Christmas decorations in September, it should be allowed to sell Christmas decorations in September.

If people want to buy them, they should be allowed to buy them.

That doesn’t mean I have to like it.

There is a difference between supporting people’s freedom to buy something and believing that relentless consumerism is unhealthy.

And Christmas may be one of the strangest things for us to turn into a months-long shopping marathon.

For Christians, Christmas has a very specific religious meaning. I understand that plenty of people celebrate Christmas today as a cultural or family holiday rather than a religious one. That’s fine. I’m a strong believer in freedom of religion, which includes your freedom to practice another religion or no religion at all.

Celebrate Christmas. Celebrate Yule. Celebrate whatever winter tradition means something to you.

That’s really not the point.

The point is that none of them require us to turn September into December.

If your primary Christmas tradition is buying increasingly large quantities of stuff beginning before the leaves have changed, perhaps somewhere along the way we’ve misplaced a little of what made the season special in the first place.

Do Not Get Me Started on the Music

Actually, too late.

I don’t want to hear Christmas music before Thanksgiving.

Truthfully, I don’t really want to hear it until about two weeks before Christmas.

It’s not that I dislike Christmas music. I like Christmas music.

At Christmas.

There are only so many times a human being can listen to essentially the same ten Christmas songs performed by a hundred different singers—some substantially better than others—before holiday cheer starts becoming an endurance event.

And it should be an unwritten rule that you don’t hear “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” on anything other than Christmas Eve.

If somebody is singing that Santa Claus is coming tonight on September 16, either the calendar is seriously broken or I have accidentally wandered into a very strange adult film.

Christmas music is special because we don’t—or at least shouldn’t—hear it all year.

Christmas lights are special because they aren’t normally covering every house.

Christmas trees are special because we don’t normally have one standing in the living room.

Anticipation is part of the experience.

If Christmas lasts for three or four months, eventually we’re not getting more Christmas.

We’re diluting Christmas.

We Are Always Trying to Push Things Forward

And the more I thought about this, the more I realized that my annoyance isn’t really about Christmas decorations.

It’s about our apparent inability to simply exist in the season we’re actually in.

We’re always pushing ahead.

The next holiday.

The next sale.

The next season.

Even the clock.

I’ve written before about why I favor permanent standard time, and in a strange way I think it’s connected to the same idea.

We decided we wanted more daylight later in the evening, so we move the clock forward and pretend the sun changed its schedule.

Of course, the sun doesn’t care what number we put on the clock.

Neither do our bodies.

The American Academy of Sleep Medicine supports permanent standard time specifically because standard time aligns more closely with human circadian biology and the natural light-dark cycle.

That’s one of the reasons I’ve argued for standard time before.

I’m not suggesting that putting your Christmas tree up in September is a medical condition.

Although I reserve the right to question your judgment.

What I am saying is that there seems to be a broader cultural instinct here: the natural rhythm isn’t convenient enough, so let’s move it.

Move the clock forward.

Move Christmas forward.

Move Halloween forward.

Call something a Winterfest while the trees are still dropping autumn leaves.

Put the next season on sale before this one has even arrived.

Everything has to be optimized, extended, marketed and monetized.

And somewhere in all of that, we forget to actually experience it.

Maybe We Should Leave Some Things Where They Are

I don’t want Christmas abolished.

Quite the opposite.

I want Christmas to feel like Christmas.

I want that first Christmas song to trigger that feeling that the season has arrived instead of making me think, “Oh Lord, not this again.”

I want Christmas lights to feel magical because suddenly the dark December evenings are filled with them.

I want the anticipation.

And before we get there, I want autumn.

I want to go buy my pumpkin.

I want Halloween.

I want Thanksgiving to get more than 15 minutes of recognition before Santa barrels through the door.

I want to watch the leaves change instead of mentally skipping ahead to snowflakes.

And I would very much like winter to wait until winter before we start holding Winterfests.

We keep moving the clocks forward, moving the holidays forward and rushing toward whatever comes next.

Maybe occasionally we should leave things where they are.

Put your Christmas tree up in September if you want.

Seriously.

I will defend your right to do it.

But I’m still going to make fun of you.

Because the Christmas tree will still be there in December. The lights will still twinkle. The presents will still get wrapped.

But the leaves only turn once a year.

Maybe we should look at them before we cover everything in fake snow.