Outraged. Mind-blown, gobsmacked, rip$h!t, bug-eyed outraged am I.
Why? Because it's a week before Halloween, the detritus left in the stores is already on clearance - except for the candy, natch! - and it appears that there is no one left in a 25-mile radius with instant fake cobweb stuff. One store I went to last week didn't even have a Halloween display up anymore.
And what is out there? Christmas stuff. Slowly taking over the shelves in every store I've been to in the last two weeks, the "holiday" stuff is starting to rear its gaudy, fiber-optic fake-snow-encrusted head.
It's revolution time.
Honestly, people, Christmas Creep is officially out of control. It's no longer a random Santa lurking on the edges of the Back-to-School stuff (which barely tailgates on the 4th of July). It's garlands and pinecones and tacky little Dickensian villages (without the open sewers and industrial-revolutionary soot everywhere). And they're on the "seasonal" shelves in my local craft store, outgunning the jack-o-lanterns and witches by five shelves to one.
I mentioned this at one of the stores I was shopping in last week, and the guy said, "I am from Sicily. If you had a store that had one holiday decoration up before the previous holiday was over, nobody would ever shop there again."
Hear hear. Far be it from me to endorse a wholly Sicilian approach to the problem; retailers may keep their knees intact. But by God, people, if we all refused to buy anything with a holly branch or a candy cane on it until the fourth Friday in November, maybe, just maybe, the Powers That Be would show a little restraint.
Who's with me?