Every year it seems that the holiday season begins a little earlier. It is not at all uncommon these days to find Christmas music playing on some stations in the second week of November with almost every station having followed suit by Black Friday. By mid-November, a person can buy Christmas lights and inflatable snowmen in any store. I could go on. But for every bit of holiday merchandise sold there is a person complaining that it is all starting too early. ‘We don’t need Christmas music before Halloween’, ‘why are they selling snowmen when there isn’t even snow on the ground’, and so on are as much a part of the latter half of November as turkey and awkward interactions with relatives. But is it really such a bad thing? For what it's worth, none of this is my own opinion, it is the viewpoints of those actually involved in playing the holiday music in October and dispensing the Christmas lights in November.

With regards to the latter of those two, winter, and by extension Christmas, merchandise is sold as early as it is so that it has time to be sold. Those who, rather than just seeing lawn decor and snow shovels in stores before leaves have begun to fall, actually have to sell things to you will often say that if they waited until what many consider to be the “holiday season” to begin selling merchandise for it they would likely find that they hadn’t sold half of what they ordered. The earlier stuff is on the shelves, the earlier people can start buying it and the more likely it is the store can make its money back and start turning a profit. People working in retail have even noted that people will complain about things being in stores too early as they are buying the very things they are complaining about.

In the case of Christmas music being on the radio too early, the explanation is a bit less cut and dry. In asking a person working for a local radio station, the best they could tell me was that they wouldn’t air something if no one listened to it. So it would seem that there are enough of those mythical people who actually enjoy holiday-themed music enough to listen to it in November to keep the radio stations providing said music supported. Or, alternatively, the music being on the air at all makes people feel that they are somehow obligated to listen to it. For the sake of mirroring the earlier example, it is not uncommon to hear someone listening to Christmas music in the car talk over it to declare how stupid it is that the stations are playing said music so early. Just as the person saying they didn’t like holiday merchandise in stores so early still bought Christmas lights, the person complaining about Christmas music still listened to it the first week of November.

So in short, Christmas music and holiday merchandise are dispensed so early because it allows those dispensing them to make a bit more money and we as the consumers don’t do anything about it. Both of these things are as depressing as they are unoriginal. But both get at a point that far fewer people acknowledge: the alternative is that a lot of this stuff couldn’t exist otherwise. If retailers couldn’t turn a profit on Christmas lights and inflatable snowmen, they would have to stop selling them to focus on safer bets like snow shovels and bags of salt. If people stopped listening to Christmas music for as much of the year, there may be fewer people willing to make new music for the holiday season and over time that may result in less music to get into the holiday spirit even closer to the actual holidays they are associated with. So, even if it is mind-numbingly annoying to hear Oh Christmas Tree when you are more concerned with carving Jack-O-Lanterns, at least it's better than not having it at all.