Manufactured Time Flying

Everyone knows the cliche 'where does the time go?'.  Whether you are talking about the work day, a vacation, or just the calendar months, we have all heard it and used it.  It seems like it is mostly used as either a conversation starter or as a bridge to another conversation, but can we take a moment to discuss time flying being manufactured?  It all is because of retail.

In recent years Christmas merchandise, Christmas commercials, and Christmas in general has shown up quite early.  In my store, we got our first shipment of holiday food the last week of August.  AUGUST!  And slowly, week by week, winter took over the store.  At one time we had Halloween in the front of the store, Christmas in the back half of the store, and I had someone ask where the Thanksgiving/Fall stuff was at.  We didn't have much at the time.  It was kind of funny, but at the same time was a little sad.  I know that Thanksgiving is not a big holiday for retail other than the day after, but people come in looking for that type of stuff.

In years past, we all started to see holiday commercials on television maybe in the middle of November, but this year I started to see commercials just a few days after Halloween.  It has increased over the past two weeks.  More and more commercials about finding that perfect gift or that Jaguar or Mercedes Benz that we all know none of us are getting sitting in the driveway.  Once you see a commercial here and there for Christmas, your brain starts to think about it, right?  I don't know how many times in years past when it wasn't until after Thanksgiving where I started to think about getting presents.  Now, I am keeping an eye out for anything that might work.  I have already asked my wife a few times for gift ideas.  It's starting to become a joke.

Part of the reason that time seems to fly by, especially this time of year, is because companies are disappearing the time between holidays.  I'm not talking about going from Halloween to Thanksgiving.  Plenty of places are skipping right over Thanksgiving and going straight into Christmas.  Basically disappearing the month of November.  So when next week you are rushing around the grocery store gathering all your Thanksgiving Day food stuffs, just remember that it is always the last Thursday of November.  It hasn't ever changed.  When you think to yourself 'where did the time go?' know that we are all subject to suggestion.  When we start seeing commercials in October with snow, and Christmas lights, and presents under the tree we need to keep in mind that we still have two months before the actual holiday.  Time doesn't fly by if you don't want it to.  Keep focused and Thanksgiving, the current forgotten holiday, won't sneak up on you.