Festive grinch Tara Ward gives an official ruling on one of the silly season’s big questions.
While scrolling through social media recently, a post popped up that made me do a double take. Amid the endless ads for facial shaving tools that plague my perimenopausal algorithm, I saw an Instagram story from a business who had just put up their Christmas tree. It was a wholesome image of a sweet child placing a sparkly bauble on an immaculately decorated tree, a moment so lovely that it should have made my heart soar in yuletide joy.
But there was one thing wrong with this picture. It was taken on October 10.
Call the police, because I’m pretty sure a crime has been committed. October 10 is 76 days away from Christmas Day, which if you’ve forgotten is on December 25. That’s two and a half months, or 10.8 weeks, or 1,824 hours, or 109,440 minutes. You can do a shitload of things in 109,440 minutes, and they should all include not thinking about Christmas in October.
Call me a grinch, but I reckon Christmas is a holiday that should be celebrated at Christmas time, i.e. in December. Christmas should not be recognised in spring. The word should not even be whispered between the start of daylight saving and Labour Weekend, and certainly not before Halloween. In the words of the great Mariah Carey: “All I want for Christmas is you, and preferably no earlier than December 1”.
What we are seeing here, New Zealand, is Christmas by stealth. Christmas has become the wilding pine of holidays, spreading out of control across the landscape and leaving no surface unsmothered. I swear it sprouts earlier and earlier each year. After I saw that early Christmas tree on my feed, I started noticing Christmas surreptitiously creeping in everywhere around me: festive chocolates already in the supermarket aisles, sickening ads of happy families wearing matching Christmas pyjamas, “silly season starts here!” slogans slashed across retail websites. Ho, ho, no.
Hush now, Christmas – your time will come. October should not herald the beginnings of Christmas stress and burnout or people putting themselves into festive debt. After all, one long-standing Christian tradition is to put up the tree on Advent Sunday (the fourth Sunday before Christmas, which this year is November 30), while another involves the tree being decorated on Christmas Eve. That might seem late, but once I had a baby at 11pm on Christmas Eve, and she still had a great time on the 25th.
Some of you may argue that you can put up your Christmas tree whenever you bloody well like, which is the same sort of misguided nonsense that Mrs Claus has to put up with from Santa every year. Deciding when to start rockin’ around the Christmas tree is a murky area, so The Spinoff has prepared a handy guide to help. Here is a definitive ruling on when it is appropriate to put up your Christmas tree. If in doubt, just remember the official advice is: not yet.
January to September: Absolutely not.
October: No.
November 1-15: If you must, but nobody needs to know about it.
November 15-30: Fine. There is a risk of peaking too soon, but let the pine needles fall where they may.
December 1-23: Yes! Let the bells ring throughout the land. Spray fake snow on your windows when it’s 24 degrees outside, drape tinsel across every surface, and bask in the synthetic aroma from your favourite pine-scented candle. See the tree, feel the tree, be the tree.
December 24: Go for gold, you absolute hero.
December 25: Look, why not. Seize the day. Rage against the dying of the fairy lights.
December 26-31: Too late? Too early? Either way, it’s a chaos move that can only be applauded.
