Race Between Christmas And Politics

The race is on, and the two competitors couldn't be more different.

It's what some might call a "hurry up" race.  Others might refer to it as "the race to prematurity."

I'm talking about the insistence on starting earlier and earlier to hawk some event.

On the holiday side, it's no secret that Santa images started popping up about the same time Freddy Kruger knocked on your door.

People say it every year, and every year they're more correct: The Christmas season seems to start earlier and earlier.

This year, my e-mail box has been flooded with various stores and businesses helping me prepare for "Black Friday," that day of shopping madness that usually comes the day after Thanksgiving.

Probably the best evidence that incrementalism has helped the Ho-Ho holiday creep up earlier is the announcement by Walmart that their Black Friday will actually begin at 10 p.m. on Thursday.  That's right, for those who can still move after a day of epicurean excess, Walmart will be holding their first big blowout of the Christmas season with a sale on toys and video games at 10 p.m. Thanksgiving night. Then at midnight comes the one that usually results in somebody getting a ride in an ambulance thanks to trampling injuries - the sale on electronics.

I always thought the Black Friday thing was indicative of the worst in our consumer society, ramping up our shopping fanaticism a full month before Rudolph needed to get his nose shined up.  Sneaking that starting pistol to Thursday night, infringing on the Thanksgiving holiday's territory, is simply wrong.

The arrival of TV ads and Christmas themed music also comes earlier and earlier.  In fact, and I'm not kidding, I actually came across the movie "The Santa Clause" playing on TV over the weekend.  (For those reading this in the future, I'm talking about Nov. 12.)

We used to joke every January that instead of taking down our holiday decorations, we should just go ahead and leave them up year round.

Thanks to the folks on Madison Avenue, that joke gets less funny each season. 

You'll know the race to start Christmas shopping early has gone too far the day you see Santa and the Easter Bunny duking it out in your front yard some April.

But it's not just the retailers with an impatience bone.

It's not just an illusion that the race for president is starting earlier and earlier.

The next president of the United States won't be sworn in until Jan. 20, 2013.  Yet here we are, in the early part of November, 2011, and we've already been forced to endure no less than a dozen televised presidential debates.  (And I use the term loosely, since I've yet to see any "debating" take place at one of these events; it's actually just a compilation of candidates taking turns offering carefully crafted competing 120-second sound bites.)

I remember the good old days, when people didn't get sick of presidential politics until the national conventions fired up in the summer.

Here it is only November of 2011, a full year before the election, and I'm already tired of hearing from and about the candidates.  Even as protracted and fake-dramatic as American Idol can be, the nonsense and final voting are wrapped up in less than two months.

You used to have to wait until the spring of an election year for political scandals to erupt.  Now we have the Herman Cain sexual harassment claims getting front page publicity at the same time Santa is making his first appearances in the Sunday newspaper.

The first primary is yet to be held, and we've already had people dropping out of the race.  It's like holding the time qualification laps for February's Daytona 500 sometime around July.

The TV personalities and political junkies were wetting themselves over the Iowa straw poll in August.  A testament to just how meaningless these early straw polls can be is the fact that the winner of the Ames straw poll just three months ago is now about one "debate" away from going back to selling Avon.

It's ridiculous how early these presidential campaigns are starting these days, and rivals the early-Christmas dope pushers for impatient stupidity.

Personally, I'm hoping to solve both problems at the same time.

If I'm able to keep my eyes open long enough to continue paying attention, I'm going to listen very carefully to the next 30 or 40 televised debates.  The first candidate to state that they will support legislation prohibiting the mention of the words "Christmas" or "Holiday Shopping" between January and November, or who promises to change the Constitution to restrict presidential campaigns to only be permitted in an actual election year, will get my support and vote.

Provided, of course, that candidate is still in the race when the next babbling, cooing, drooling, caca-producing, gibberish-spouting political twins are born at the national conventions nine months from now.