Monday 21 November 2011

holiday creep or proscenium

It seems that Christmas decorations are being cast like a festive drag-net earlier and earlier each year, but I do wonder how much of that is reality and how much is perception: could any of this be governed by climate change and the global weirding, that does not just yield warmer weather but also seasonal (delays) creep and has natural patterns in theatrics and all off-kilter? German shops seem to have embraced a Christmas season spanning almost two months as well, but I wonder what's in the weather and what's in parallel holiday fatigue in the States.
Here, there's no intervening secular gathering like Thanksgiving that supposedly makes lights and festoonery more seemly, if one waits until afterwards. In Germany, there's general restraint and respect until after Totensonntag, a day set aside for remembering the departed, which falls on the Sunday before First Advent and whose celebration is driven by the calendar and what day of the week Christmas falls on.  Both Totensonntag and the Advent Calendar were originally Prussian-Lutheran inventions adopted later by the rest of Germany. I don't know if unseasonable weather compels people to decorate early, but decorations don't seem to jive with the prolonged Golden Autumn we're experiencing. H and I have not decorated yet, as such, but we did put up a length of rope lights from the basement and strung them behind the now sadly bare flower boxes (there was an early freeze but I imagine that the geraniums would be fine now otherwise). In the evening, illuminated by the footlights, I imagine that to the audience it looks like we are on stage.