You can only keep Christmas at bay for so long. Soon enough, fir boughs snake their way up bannisters and dull brick strip-malls festoon themselves with oversized Christmas wreaths. Feliz Navidad commences its loop on State radio. Peeps turn from orange to green. No one can stop the onslaught of holiday season, which now kicks off pretty much the second we wheel our barbecues away on Labor Day. No one, except Target. Seldom do we get the heroes we deserve, but the day on which Target announced it would hold off on Christmas-signage [in the front of the store] until after Thanksgiving, was a day in which a tiny voice rang out against a Goliath. Target, ILY.
Already, stores across the nation are dusting off their reusable Christmas decorations and skipping right past Fall to the Advent. In a strip mall near you, The Christmas Tree Shop, which is inexplicably open year-round, is starting to look smug once again. Nowhere is safe. Santas lurk around every corner, making a simple trip to get some pillow-sized bags of Veggie Straws an odyssey (it's dinnertime, help). I'm already bribing my 2-year-old with candy just to pee and sit in her carseat; how am I supposed to survive a display of chocolate Santas en route to the toilet paper aisle?
But ho! In the distance, a star comes to a rest over a big box store that will keep its Christmas trees and special holiday-edition bags and signs away from the front of the store until November 24. Targettttttt, in the siege that is #christmascreep, you are winning AF.
Christmas creep, just to be clear, isn't when you layer too many fair isle sweaters inside an Ergo and find your midriff bared after your squirmy baby works the knit up around your bra. Officially, Christmas creep is the occupation of holiday shelves and signage by "holiday" insignia and product earlier each year. Soon, if my data models of #Christmascreep are accurate, we will soon be seeing wreaths appear as early as Easter.
We were blessed with the good news re: the freedom to be you and me after a representative of Target clarified their policy change to a reporter at Scary Mommy. The official word from a Target spokesperson: "As it relates to Thanksgiving, we’ve heard from our guests that they want us to celebrate Thanksgiving before moving into the holidays."
If by "we've heard from our guests," the spokesperson means, "we've seen the increasingly desperate tweets of people who find refuge in their local Target with their kids, and do not want to put away their mid-weight cardigans just yet," then yes, Target, you heard my cry. It's going to be pumpkin season for a little longer, y'all.*
Target knows that the best present you can get a person for Christmas is a few extra weeks to wear a thin, purely decorative scarf as you stroll through an aisle of tiny shoes that still have their mate (not for long, tiny shoes). Target knows that nothing is so joyful as sipping your PSL and eating packaged pumpkin pies in the interests of, you know, vegetables. Target knows that there will be plenty of time for mulling everything in our cupboards in giant steel vats with unseemly amounts of cinnamon and cloves, and that we should spend time piling gourds into cornucopias for a second longer.
There's a song you often hear at Christmas, though it isn't strictly a Christmas song. "There's a hero," it goes, "if you look inside your heart. You don't have to be afraid." It's a song about heroes. And Target, you are that. Bullseye.
*I'm not Southern, or even American, but nothing feels more y'allsy than getting an extension on decorative gourd season.
