Bloated season crowding out other holidays

A new crop of sweaty faces arrived recently at my neighborhood gym, which can only mean that the holiday season is gaining on us fast.

“Check this out,” said a young man on a Stairmaster, chuckling as he lifted his T-shirt so his neighbor could witness the jiggly result of his gluttonous ways. “I’ve still got Thanksgiving and Christmas to go. If I don’t knock off some of this flab, I’m gonna be a blimp by New Year’s.”

This sudden rush to the gym, designed for the sole purpose of shedding at least a few old pounds before gaining 5 more brand-new ones during the plate-mounding, gut-busting holiday eating marathon ahead, is just one of the many subtle signs that the time bandits are out there in force, doing their dirty work.

The time bandits have been working overtime in the last few years, in fact, mischievously stealing our sense of seasonal order and turning the calendar into a blur of overlapping holidays that no longer have a clear beginning or end. These days, it’s all one big swollen middle. Jingle bells now piggyback on the warm breezes of Indian summer while competing with the howls of Halloween and the roars of Thanksgiving football bowl games.

Fall and winter have finally become one.

Each year I try to put it all out of my mind and make believe that it’s not really happening this fast, that Christmas can’t really be gearing up even before the World Series has been played out. I try desperately to concentrate instead on where I am in the world of real time rather than the artificial one created earlier each year by the purveyors of holiday cheer.

An article last month in USA Today reminded me, however, that my resistance to an ever-expanding Christmas season is probably as futile as trying to figure out who is going to replace the Clintons in the White House come January. As the article pointed out, retailers really are firing up the Olde Yuletide Express more than two months in advance of Christmas Day – no, we’re not just imagining it – and they’re offering no apologies for the crush.

As Internet commerce increasingly competes with brick-and-mortar merchants for a finite amount of family shopping dollars, the old rules of restraint that once governed holiday merchandising are gone forever. Which is why Bing Crosby now starts crooning about his dreams for a white Christmas – in a two-CD holiday gift set, only $19.95 – long before the leaves have even begun to fall from the trees. It’s why stores begin advertising their “Christmas sneak-preview” nights even before we’ve finally figured out who gets the honor of hosting the Thanksgiving dinner this year.

The time bandits have turned Santa’s arrival at the end of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade into as big an anticlimax as the N.Y. Yankees winning another championship. By the time the jolly old gnome finally shows up on his sled, looking charmingly befuddled, we’ve already encountered his mug so many times in so many places over the weeks that he seems irrelevant. The monthlong holiday season Santa used to usher in so merrily after Thanksgiving now feels more like the country’s last-minute shopping spree.

Trying to keep the holidays in perspective is getting tougher all the time. At the supermarket the other day, where you can now shop for turkeys while listening to reindeer songs, I overheard a couple of women breathlessly comparing notes on how their Christmas shopping was going, and how much they had left to buy. The conversation disoriented me for a minute, considering that my family just got around to throwing out the Halloween jack-o’-lantern in last week’s trash.

I swear, that pumpkin wasn’t even completely rotten yet.