Happy One-Sixth of Your Year

And so we now get to deal with more than a month of holiday-themed commercials and jingles and print ads and incessant Christmas music and movies to the point where one wants to cap oneself. Don't get me wrong -- I enjoy Christmas as much as the next guy. However, I like that it's only 12/25. Or only December. I don't like that it's now a two-month season and by the time it's over it feels like the South after the Civil War around here or Salt Lake City after the Olympic games. That is to say, spent.

It all really begins now right after Halloween. You go into a drugstore or mall in early November and there's Christmas shit everywhere. Christmas carols playing nonstop. But that's just the beginning. When I was a kid, a couple of New York radio stations began playing 24 hours of Christmas music from Christmas Eve through Christmas Day. Well, that's nice. I like that. It's sort of like the yule log but on the radio. Well, then some jackass had the bright idea to extend it to more than 24 hours. But it wasn't like we went from 24 hours to 48 hours or a week or something. No, we went straight to six fuckin' weeks of Christmas music. And, again, don't get me wrong. Hearing a nifty Christmas tune tucked in with other adult contemporary music is nice as you're driving home from work. But when radio stations change their goddamn format, as is the case of 106.7 Lite FM in New York the past couple of years, well, that's just a little bit ridiculous. You know when they went to 24/7 Christmas music this year? I'm really not sure because it happened so early, I wasn't even prepared to keep my ears open for it yet. I first noticed it on November 17. Do we really need five or six weeks of constant Christmas music? Who is in the mood on November 17? And, really, what ever happened to Thanksgiving? It's really just part of Christmas at this point. I remember as a kid they had Santa at the end of the Thanksgiving Day Parade and they always said the season officially began with that and I always remember us thinking, man, that's a long way off; how silly. But now it's begun even before Santa gets his ass off the beach at the end of August! How much longer before Christmas swallows up Halloween as well?

Back to the overload. Perhaps the most annoying aspect of Christmas commercialism has been the advent in recent years of those effing Lexus commercials. Oh, yes, you know the ones. The same goofy-ass jingle plays every year. It's very effective -- without even looking up at the TV I am immediately pissed off. This season, one of the commercials shows a haughty, well-to-do woman shopping online for random things, among them a sweater. Then she sees a Lexus and decides to get that instead. Must be nice to have that kind of financial flexibility. Either she's one of those housebound wives who have zero concept of what things cost, or her husband makes so much she doesn't even care. Or maybe it's a commentary on the nature of severely in-debt Americans. The very concept of buying your 35-year-old spouse a Lexus (as a surprise) for Christmas is insulting to many. At least last year they seemed to begin to realize the backlash they were getting and tried to poke a little fun at themselves. In one, the guy couldn't successfully do the red bow; in another, the husband puts the Lexus SUV next to the tree in the living room and when his wife sees it, she's more intrigued by how he got it into the house than the fact that he just gave her a $45K luxury sport-ute. They definitely need to continue in this direction or else people (led by me) are going to begin torching Lexus dealerships. I'll give you a freakin' December to remember, bitches.