A crew prepares white spruce tree from Lunenburg County that was selected as Nova Scotia's 2025 Tree for Boston, in Martins Brook, N.S,. on Nov. 12.Darren Calabrese/The Canadian Press
Got your tree up yet?
The annual fa-la-la-la brouhaha is upon us. It starts earlier and earlier every year. Long before Mary would have even been in her third trimester.
The phenomenon is called “Christmas creep” and it’s no accident. In fact, there’s a surprising history behind why the gas station has a tree up the day after Halloween. Turns out there’s a direct link between seasonally jumping the gun and the 32nd president of the United States. There are also some pretty noble intentions behind what has become crass commercialism today.
These Canadians are embracing early holiday decor – and jingling their bells at the haters
Here’s a peek at how Christmas creep got started.
It was 1939. The Great Depression – the longest, deepest downturn in the global economy – had been entrenched for a decade. Political administrations were striving to engineer social mechanisms in hope of turning things around. Back then, American Thanksgiving took place on the last Thursday of November. Back then, no one really turned their minds to Christmas until all the turkey soup was gone. It was an unwritten rule of sorts.
Between the two big annual holidays, there were a scant four weeks. This mercantile preamble to the Christmas shopapaloooza has long been one of the prime economic drivers. Then-president Franklin D. Roosevelt wondered if, by extending the Christmas shopping season even by one week, he could stoke the fires of the moribund economy. All that was required would be advancing the holiday to the previous Thursday.
In 1939, then-U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to boost the economy by extending the Christmas shopping season.The Associated Press
There was considerable grousing about monkeying with the national holiday calendar but, after three years of “Franks-giving,” American Thanksgiving was uniformly and officially established in 1941 as the fourth Thursday of November.
(Canadian Thanksgiving, institutionalized in 1957 as the second Monday in October, isn’t the same starting gate for the holiday season; it’s just too early to directly affect Christmas. After all, there are still the hurdles of Remembrance Day and Halloween to get past.)
Franks-giving wasn’t the first engineering of Christmas commerce. During the First World War, the Council of National Defense advised getting gifts to servicemen in the mail no later than Nov. 17. The message in 1918 was to “Take the crush out of your Christmas shopping and put it into winning the war.”
Similarly, in 1906, the entreaty from the National Consumers League was, “For the sake of humanity, shop early.” The trend at the time was to shop just before the 25th, which put an immense burden on factories – in particular, child labourers – clerks and delivery drivers.
Today, those lofty impulses behind an early Christmas season have been jettisoned by naked – well, maybe not so much naked as festooned – commerce. Harrods, the iconic British retailer, mounts its Christmas World shop in August. Yes, August.
The Galeries Lafayette department store boasts Paris’ most famous Christmas tree.Stephanie Lecocq/Reuters
Within the deepest canon of the holiday, however, there are ironclad strictures about Christmas observances. Advent, the fourth Sunday before Christmas, is supposed to mark the preparation for the celebration of Jesus’ birth. Twelfth Night, which falls on Jan. 5, marks the end of the 12 days of Christmas. Decorations left up after the fifth are supposed to visit misfortune upon the delinquent.
The whole institutional Christmas tree thing is also a runaway reindeer. Every hamlet and corporation now has its tree and lighting ceremony. Annually, Oslo presents the City of London with the Trafalgar Square Christmas tree. Boston has an itinerary of Christmas tree installations and lightings. Galeries Lafayette department store boasts Paris’ most famous Christmas tree with Notre Dame’s tree coming in a close second. Los Angeles’ Rodeo Drive Holiday Lighting Celebration already took place on Nov. 13, with palm trees being the star of the show.
Since the Coolidge administration, the White House has hauled in a tree harvested from one of their country’s national parks. They give it a name – this year’s 53-foot tree is named Silver Belle – and there’s an app that lets you track the tree as it glad-hands its way across the country.
This 75-foot Norway Spruce will be lit up at New York's Rockefeller Plaza on Dec. 3 and stay up until mid-January.Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/The Associated Press
But the most famous Christmas tree in the world is the tree at New York’s Rockefeller Center. A tradition since 1931, this year’s 75-foot Norway Spruce will be lit up on Dec. 3 and stay up in the plaza until mid-January.
Cast your eyes over the windows of any condo tower as the days grow darker. You’ll note a premature proliferation of personal Christmas trees, all of which can probably be traced to the inception of artificial trees. Real trees have an elf-on-the-shelf life, whereas a fake tree can stay up all year, if you so desire.
Artificial trees were invented back in the 1930s but took off with the introduction of snazzy aluminum trees in the 1960s. The figures are wobbly, but artificial trees account for more than half of the trees you see today.
As for me and my tree? I’m doing something new this year. I call it “the deconstructed Christmas tree.” I’m not assembling the damned thing and all of the lights and ornaments are staying in their boxes, which – fa-la-la-la – will be arrayed prettily around the horizontal tree. Eggnog, anyone?