Let us give thanks

... that we have just a month and day until the nation's retailers can start stocking the shelves with Valentine's Day detritus.
I'm weary. It's been a long siege already. It started in late August when pallets of Christmas started to appear in the back of the stores.
By the end of September, the green-and-red packaging was unabashedly on display. The music started in October.
For most of this month, newspapers have been running stories about Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the great American hunger for cheap stuff made in China, southeast Asia, and south Asia. Walmart has positioned crates of things that we've just got to have, wrapped in black plastic, around their stores in readiness for that great and glorious day, which is not Christmas or Judgment Day, but the day when we shop even more deliriously.

The Boston Globe has discovered that, during Advent, they can make more money from their advertisers by giving their paper away on Thursdays.

I don't enjoy being a curmudgeon about Christmas. I want to share the joy of Christmas morning with the grandkids, but even there it's getting sketchy. When the local news station reports that kids want the iPad more than any other gift, I grieve because we may have lost another generation.
We'll make it, though. The spirit of Christmas triumphs over stupid each year, although each year the score is closer. We'll make it. We always do.