The Christmas Before The Nightmare: Charlie’s plan to combat Christmas creep

Darkness falls across the land, the dancing hour is close at hand. Grizzly ghouls go door to door, to spread the spooks from roof to floor. And though you fight to stay alive, your body starts to shiver, for no mere mortal can resist the — Ah shit, no! It’s Santa and his deer, they’re beating my ass with Christmas cheer.

Gingerbread houses, Mariah Carey, the smell of skata in the air: what do all of these have in common? They shouldn’t be around in fucking October, that’s what!

Hello everyone, Charlie here, and I come to you today with a warning. For even with its army of skeletoned boys, sexy blood-covered nurses and expired candy, Halloween can no longer hold back the deluge that is Christmas. Like many, I am ambivalent towards Christmas. I like celebrating Jesus’s pagan-themed birthday as much as anyone else, but I’d like to keep my All Hallows’ Eve as spooky as possible. So today, we’re talking about the Christmas Creep (no, it isn’t me) and more importantly, we’re figuring out how to stop it!

So, what is Christmas creep? Imagine if it was Christmas every day. Wouldn’t that be amazing? No? Then you’re not thinking about our corporate overlords! Christmas creep is a trend that occurs within many major businesses who have noticed that the Christmas season tends to be their most lucrative time of year. So, they think to themselves, “Hey, how bout we just sell Christmas shit earlier and earlier to maximize those profits! It’s clear that customers just love Christmas products. Right?!” And now we’ve been dealing with Christmas in fucking September ever since Santa sold his rights to be on the Coca Cola bottle after they shot that one polar bear. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that these early Christ-themed guerilla tactics boost sales for large retailers, so even though hating on Christmas creep is common, it seems to be an effective marketing strategy.

This problem, I believe, is particularly prevalent in Iceland since a large chunk of the economy is bolstered by selling merch depicting Grýla and the Boys to tourists waddling off their cruise ships to buy the ugliest Christmas baubles I have ever seen. I swear to god if I get another drunk tourist trying to tell me Leppalúði lore I’m going to drown myself in the Blue Lagoon. I’m already dreading the arrival of the terrifying Yule Lad holograms that go up over the city. This has got to stop.

Since Alþingi has once again failed to respond to my petition to cancel Christmas and Reykjavík has gone so far as to declare its intentions to become a “Christmas city,” I propose another solution: malicious compliance. If Christmas supplies are being peddled to us in October, I want Christmas vacation now! If poor retail workers have to listen to “All I Want For Christmas Is You” one season early, they might as well get their minimum wage bonuses starting in early autumn.

In theory, is it harmful for stores to put up Christmas decorations to scam shoppers into buying more junk they don’t need? Probably not. But does it constantly remind me of the gradual decline of our society into a late-stage capitalist hellscape of our own making, the only escape from which is to flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of an age of mercantilism? Yes.

Want more of Charlie Winters’ musings in your life? Read more here.