One of the great things about Christmas is all those news stories telling us that because something good happened to somebody sometime after Halloween, Christmas has come early.

(Two points of clarification. By “Christmas” in the above, I refer to the general late-fall/early winter season of secular merriment and gift-giving, not to the specific religious event central to the Christian faith. By “great,” I mean “really annoying.”)

Let English teachers object to this trite construction all they want, it persists and spreads like an itch from wet woolens. My first sighting this season, several weeks ago, was a news item in which Christmas had come early for the selectmen of some small town or another because they got a government grant for their sewers. In the past week, I’ve read two pieces in the entertainment press asserting that Christmas is coming early for Hollywood because the new James Bond movie is exactly like the 238 James Bond movies before it and thus sure to be wildly popular.

Call it Premature Yuletide Syndrome – a quick scan of news far and wide turned up many, many cases. According to the Nov. 5 issue of Socialist Worker Weekly, “Christmas came early for the corporate pals” of Republicans. For the high-tech publication InfoWorld, “Christmas came early with a 1 U-high gigahertz server running Unix with standard gigabit Ethernet.” Whee. Christmas also came early for residents of a certain section of Akron, Ohio, with the cheery finding that a toxic waste site wasn’t quite as toxic as previously thought and, as the result of a favorable court ruling, for advocates of grandparents’ rights in Florida (although the grumpy grandparents made it clear they still weren’t happy enough).

The sports press loves Christmas coming early. In fact, it apparently has license to say so from Labor Day on, whether it’s in reference to a player bouncing back from serious injury or making bail just in time for the big game. In one singular example, a sports writer in Wales observed that “Christmas came early for the 5,000 rain-drenched fans of the Llanelli rugby squad” because, although they got walloped by Cardiff 65-16, it was a distinct improvement over last year’s 81-3 walloping. (Or, as they say in Wales, wwallloping.) In professional rodeo, there is a period in July so packed with big-money events it’s called Cowboy Christmas, so you-know-what comes mighty early for the ropin’ and ridin’ set.

Sometimes, this seasonal banality is used in a way that suggests Santa’s standards are getting bit lax. The story this past week about Maine soda distributors walloping the Maine Bureau of Health was covered by just about every news outlet in the state and more than few saw in it signs of PYS.

The story, familiar to all by now, is that the rampaging epidemic of obesity, especially among kids, and the disastrous health consequences and crushing and health-care costs that result, led the bureau to mount a media campaign boosting sound diet and moderate exercise. One installment noted that soda, with its high sugar content and nonexistent nutrition, is a leading contributor of empty calories. The message was that kids should cut back.

Amid the holiday cheer, Maine’s soda distributors and bottlers were saddened, understandable considering how hard they’ve worked, through their program of “donating” athletic scoreboards, to get their advertising and their products in schools across the state. So they did what any sensible industry would do in such circumstances – they hired the public relations firm of Gov. King’s friend and former press secretary to make a stink. And sure enough, the governor who doesn’t have time before leaving office to fix a current $44 million budget deficit, much less do anything about the $900-million deficit he’ll leave his successor, made room on his busy end-of-term schedule and met with the poor soda waifs to hear their complaint. And then met with the Bureau and, laying a finger aside his nose (no, not that finger), told the Bureau to lay off. Sometimes one person’s sugarplum is another person’s lump of coal.

Sometimes it’s sweet for everybody. A press release out of the governor’s office this week, as joyous as any Christmas card, gushed about a valued member of his staff getting a new job. Greg Nadeau has been Gov. King’s senior policy advisor for eight years. Now, just weeks from being out of work, Mr. Nadeau gets a policy advisor gig at the Maine Department of Transportation. The governor was quoted at length and with great glee about this happy turn of events, as was the advisor.

Why is this glad tidings for all? For state workers helping to balance the budget with unpaid furlough days, this brief thaw in the government-wide hiring freeze is a chance to enjoy someone else’s lucky break. And who doesn’t enjoy that? For the Maine public, filling a wonk job while cuts are made to education, to care for the mentally ill, those sorts of things, is a sign that the economy may be turning the corner – they don’t call this the season of hope for nothing. For the next governor, it means that his commissioner of transportation, yet to be named, will find his or her new office well-supplied with pencils, paper clips, even policy advice, from day one.

Sometimes PYS is so acute the oft-heard phrase “You shouldn’t have” is the only appropriate response. It has now been two months since 14 immigrant forest workers from Guatemala and Honduras drowned in the Allagash, since Maine people learned some very ugly things about work in the woods and since the Maine Department of Labor promised a thorough and swift review of the visa programs that lets the forest-products industry bring foreign workers into Maine to do jobs Maine people used to do and of the working conditions that made these jobs unappealing to all but some of the world’s most desperate people.

This week the department said there is no such review and, for good measure, announced it would rubber stamp the application by Cianbro, the state’s largest construction firm, for visas to bring in foreign workers to do jobs its says Maine people won’t do. The recipients of this extravagant gifts of business-as-usual, though grateful, must have one question: How can you tell Christmas has come early if it never goes away?

Bruce Kyle is the assistant editorial page editor for the Bangor Daily News.