Holiday Creep

We’ve all heard of feature creep – a form of runaway expectations in which additional features keep being added to a relatively straightforward project until no one could possibly complete it, let alone bring it in during the original time frame and for the original budget. Today I want to talk about Holiday Creep, or the way that distant holidays keep growing less and less distant as the years go by. There was a time, long ago, when the Christmas shopping season did not begin until after Thanksgiving, and people had a chance to recover from the Holidays before the onslaught of Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, President’s Day and Easter began. Today, you’d be lucky to have enough time to pack away one set of holiday decorations before the next big day.

For example, when I was working in retail in the 1990s, Valentine’s Day would officially begin about two weeks after Christmas – just long enough for the store to milk any remaining sales out of the After Christmas Clearance sale. Then we’d pack any remaining Christmas merchandise into the attic (including some of the candy – there are popular sweets with a three-year shelf life!) and bring down the Valentine’s decorations. By about this time of year we’d have the Seasonal aisle loaded up with cards, candy, and a wide array of red and pink heart-shaped knick-knacks of every possible description. Shortly thereafter, the sort of people who get their Christmas shopping done by September would come in to get their Valentine’s needs covered, having already finished with their income tax returns.

A few weeks later, a normal clientele (mostly female) would come in, gearing up for the holiday with high hopes. By early February, the customer demographic would be shading into a mixture of men (well-organized ones) and women (procrastinators), and by the week before Valentine’s Day, most of the people in the seasonal aisle would be male. During the week leading up to the big day it’s almost unheard of to find a female shopping in the Valentine’s Day section, and the men are beginning to look very pleased with themselves. One can clearly imagine that in prior years they forgot the day, or waited until the last second, and are now feeling very good because they’ve obtained their gifts with two days to go. By the 14th the customers would be frantic, knowing that if they came home empty handed they’d never hear the end of it, and by dinnertime that night the men bolting in through the door would literally buy anything even vaguely heart-shaped.

And then, after a day or two to clear out leftover Valentine’s candy (some of that will last until next year, too, but it’s better to clear it out and start fresh) my crew and I would be pulling green decorations and party favors for St. Patrick’s Day out of the attic, and moving on to Easter a few weeks after that.

Now, I don’t intend to blame the current economic issues facing this country on holiday buying. Certainly, retail stores need holiday-based sales in order to stay in business, and our economy needs both those retail channels and the jobs they create in order to stay afloat. But I do have to question if this cycle has gotten out of control. In a world where people are defaulting on their sub-prime mortgages and abandoning cars with remaining payments that exceed twice the value of the vehicle, is it really a good idea to be trying to sell people Easter candy while they are still hung over from New Year’s Eve? If we have become a nation of debtors, should we really be encouraging people to start blowing money they don’t have on Christmas presents before Halloween? I don’t have the answers; I only hope that someone out there does. Because at this rate, it’s only a matter of time before next year’s Holiday shopping season begins before this year’s Holidays are over…