Hannah Johnston ‘16
Opinions Editor
As the holiday season commences, many families and friends gather around in excitement with decorations, presents, and cheer. After all, the holidays are a time of celebration and comfort. Although the season is something to be excited about, America has certainly taken it to the next level. With holiday advertisements starting well before Thanksgiving this year, and Black Friday shopping actually beginning on Thursday, it is easy to see how this obsession has gone too far.
Of course, one of the biggest supporters of the holidays is ABC Family, but recently they have been taking the excitement to another level. Their 25 Days of Christmas program provides a block period for the channel for the month of December up until the 25th to show various holiday related movies and television programs. In 2012, the program block averaged 2.8 million viewers, according to tvbythenumbers.com. With the immense success that ABC Family has received from this special televised event, they even started a countdown; wait for it, to the countdown. Amanda Remling from the ibtimes.com states “While the official Christmas fun on the network doesn’t kick off until Sunday, Dec. 1, excited fans can get a head start on the season with holiday-themed entertainment,” However, this horribly unnecessary additive is a main contributor to the elongated holiday season. It’s quite humorously hard to believe that here in America, if we simply cannot be patient for something, we just bring it to us faster.
According to Disney.com, the reason for ABC Family starting their countdown so early is that “they aren’t letting a little thing like November get in the way of starting their holiday programming.” Sorry, I was not aware that November was such an insignificant month and should just be morphed into December, along with the exaggerated holiday cheer. It is not like November houses two very important holidays, Veterans Day to honor our soldiers and Thanksgiving to give thanks to all that we have, or anything like that. No, let us just keep on celebrating mythical animated elves and some cliché movie with Vince Vaughn starring as his classic role of the fast-talking, bumptious-childlike man that seems to be his character in every single movie.
In reality if we continue on this countdown path the only direction we can go is down. What’s next? Hopefully a countdown to the countdown to the countdown is not in our near future, or even worse a countdown starting way back in August.
