Christmas Come Early (Again)

It's that time of year again, when I complain about how Christmas gets earlier every year.  Well, today I spotted my first Christmas trees - Marks and Spencer had them up, albeit undecorated so far, on every floor of their Crapchester store.  I'm assuming that this was to coincide with the launch of their 2021 Christmas TV ad campaign, which has been running for a couple of days so far - I notice that Asda have now followed suit with their first seasonal TV ad.  Apparently, John Lewis have launched their TV ad as well - but as I never shop there, I never pay attention to theirs.  Crapchester town centre has yet to put up any festive decorations, although we had a portent of the imminent arrival of Christmas the other week when the German sausage stall appeared outside Superdrug to replace the Summer's ice cream van.  (Thankfully, no Brexit protesors turned up to shout 'No to German sausages - British bangers only!').  Today, though, we did have the 'Procession of Light' to mark the start of Diwali, which seemed to consist mainly of little girls in spangly dresses carrying lanterns.  The cynic in me an't help but think that holding this on the fifth of November was a shameless attempt on the council's part to divert attention from the fact that they are too tight fisted to finance a municipal fireworks display for Bonfire Night.

For their part, the council would probably say that this was all part of their drive to embrace diversity by celebrating festivals from other cultures.  If nothing else, it provides us with another barrier between Halloween and the inevitable onslaught of Christmas and the High streets full of relentless entreaties to 'spend, spend, spend!'.  It remains to be seen if the two parts of our shopping centre (the newer part is under different ownership to the older) engage in another battle of rival lighting up ceremonies, as in previous years or whether we end up with the two rival Christmas trees that we've seen in recent years.  The trouble is that, despite this rivalry, in recent times both sets of decorations have been pretty poor, with the municipal ones outside the main malls no better.  Lat year this made for a pretty desultory feel for Christmas shoppers.  Everybody seems to have better decorations than Crapchester.  Damn it, some years ago, I had to go on a training course in Eastliegh in December and had to walk past their town centre and even they had a better display than us!  No wonder so many people around here seem to spend so much time and effort on putting up elaborate external decorations on their houses every December!  Anyway, there you have it, my annual seasonal moan about Christmas starting too early.  Some things never change.