Who hijacked Chri$tmas?

I’m sure many retailers are wishing that it could be Christmas every day. Shopping this season really has put a great big smile on somebody’s face and retailers are expected record crowds in the Boxing Day sales with consumers hungry for real discounts.

Imagine if it was Christmas every day. We simply wouldn’t celebrate it and marketers wouldn’t plan their year around it either.

The “season” that has become Christmas is so vast and so huge that it is starting to look more like a marketing theme then an actually celebration of a religious figure.

Take all the popular Christmas songs that are sung each December around the world. ‘Let It Snow’ and ‘White Christmas’ for example. I can’t begin to tell you how weird they are to listen to when you’re in Australia and its 40 degrees outside.

And then there are the Christmas decorations, the Christmas cards – all featuring snow.

In terms of marketing essentials, Christmas includes the lot: a jingle (or 100), a loveable character, a path to purchase and lots of cute little one liners.

And it all works. We spend more money between September and December than we do all year. We buy things like themed serviettes, dinnerware that we can only use once a year, fake trees, cards, jumpers that we look ridiculous in and jewellery that lights up. Are we buying these to pay our respects for the origins of the holiday? I suspect not…

Furthermore, what was conceived as a celebration of Christianity has taken on many forms with it even being celebrated in countries, such as Japan and South Korea, where only a small percentage of the population is Christian.

And why do some people eat ham and others eat Turkey? In Switzerland they have a fondue chinoise and in France they eat prawns and oysters. If we were all celebrating the same thing, surely we’d all be doing it the same way.

The same can be said for holidays such as Easter. Chocolate eggs, if you really think about it, don’t quite make sense.

So was it marking that hijacked Christmas? Or consumers?

They say that the true meaning of Christmas is…oh hang on, I forget. Is it shopping and alcohol?

Don’t get me wrong, I love Christmas as much as the next person. It just seems that we seem to be getting sillier and sillier when it comes to what marketers try to get away with at this time of year.

Here’s such an example:

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