Time - Christmas creep has been with us for a very long time—since the late 1800s, in fact. It has evolved from a late-Victorian habit of early shopping to a socialist attempt to tackle overtime and seasonal child labor, and finally to a strategic tool for retailers looking to cash in.
But it has accelerated significantly in recent years. According to a recent Financial Times article, Christmas in Britain this year arrived three weeks earlier than it did a decade ago. In practical terms, this means that in some shops Christmas displays appeared in August. In my native Greece, Christmas decorations appeared as early as early November for the first time ever. This follows an already established trend in America, where it is not unheard of for Christmas to overtake Halloween; the New York Times recently reported its first “Christmas in July.”
Like with other creeping cultural phenomena, the difficult question is knowing what or who causes the trend. For while it may be straightforward to find the cause of an action by pointing to a particular mind behind it, when a phenomenon is so ubiquitous, where shall we look for the cause?
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