‘Christmas creep’ has gone too far this time

For sale in the village shop last week: punnets of locally-grown strawberries, multicoloured bucket-and-spade sets, postcards featuring British beach scenes… and no fewer than 14 varieties of Christmas bauble. Down the street at the Post Office, you can buy Christmas cards, tinsel – in green, red or sparkly silver – and wrapping paper festooned with candy canes. The garden centre, meanwhile, is doing a roaring trade in tins of festive shortbread (expiry date: 26 October). Christmas, so the saying goes, comes but once a year. And this year, it seems to have come during a baking hot August.

Before you suggest I live in a sort of Yuletide wormhole, it’s happening nationwide. At John Lewis, sales of baubles and faux trees are three times higher than they were this time last year, with 100 festive products currently available on its website. At Lakeland, you can buy Christmas modelling kits, DIY gingerbread houses and assorted stocking fillers, while advent calendars – by beauty brands including Laura Ashley, Joules and Benefit – went on sale at Boots this month.

We’re all familiar with the dreaded ‘Christmas creep’, a ploy by retailers to start the festive season as early as possible in a bid to plump profits. In previous years there have been complaints about Christmas eclipsing Halloween. But this, surely, has got to be a record. School is still out for summer. The sun is shining. There are 118 days until 25 December. I’m no Grinch, but I can’t even begin to think about Christmas until I’m wearing a jumper and drinking toffee-nut lattes (which, incidentally, go on sale at the start of November). So what on earth is going on?

Retailers are blaming the hangover of Covid uncertainty: with so much upheaval around the last couple of festive periods, this year families are planning early and going all out. According to a survey by advertising agency IPA, 44 per cent of Britons intend to have their Christmas shopping done before Black Friday (26 November), 17 per cent will do it between September and October, and 8 per cent will have Christmas all wrapped up by the end of this month.

Add to that the cost-of-living crisis – spiralling energy bills, rising food prices and inflation at its highest rate in decades – and perhaps it’s no wonder shoppers are starting already, for fear that costs will continue to go up. Do your shopping now, retailers seem to be suggesting, and you can take advantage of cut-price stock left over from last year. Unless you’re a real seasonal snob, there’s no difference between 2021’s baubles and 2022’s, after all.

The weather has got to take some of the blame, too. There’s nothing quite like record-breaking heat to make us daydream about snuggly evenings on the sofa watching Strictly. After the hottest, driest spell in 111 years, most of us are delighted to see the back of our parched August and wishing winter would hurry up and arrive. So is it any wonder, really, if our thoughts also turn to Christmas shopping?

A friend recalls a recent visit to a National Trust gift shop, where an apologetic sign over a display of Christmas cards acknowledged that they were intended mostly for overseas tourists who like to stock up on festive fayre while in the UK. Britain is, indeed, a hub for Christmas tourism, especially from Asia, with millions of visitors a year flocking to cities such as London, York and Edinburgh, as well as villages in the Cotswolds and rural Wales, any time from July to November – and seeking to take home with them a piece of the winter wonderland they imagine this country becomes when the first snow falls.

I have no problem with this (although I do feel for the poor tourists whose experience may be less Love, Actually and more akin to a scene from Scrooge), but as the mother of two young children, this year’s Christmas creep is weighing on me more than ever. With a three-year-old and a one-year-old, ‘pester power’ already holds far too much sway in our house: my elder son has been asking for a blue scooter from Father Christmas since approximately mid-May, while my younger son wants everything his brother gets and then some. I dread to think of the requests – nay, demands – that will emerge over the coming months, as they are bombarded by adverts pushing the latest over-priced, ‘must-have’ toy or game.

Try telling a toddler with no concept of time that Santa isn’t coming for another 17 weeks and you’re asking for a tantrum. We’re getting through it by diverting all discussions about presents on to other Christmassy topics: what the weather’s like at the North Pole in August (mild and drizzly, if you’re interested), what Mrs Claus’s first name is (Gertrude, apparently) and what reindeer like to eat (moss and lichen). By December, at this rate, we’ll be ready to trounce the locals in the festive pub quiz.

For now, my plea is this: do not encourage the Christmas creep. If we don’t all go on an out-of-season spending spree, retailers will have to reconsider. With any luck, life will be back to normal by 2023, and we can put this down to an aberration of mad weather, winter anxiety and general doom and gloom.

Christmas may be the most wonderful time of the year, but it’s simply not that time yet. Step away from the tinsel, put down that box of fairy lights – and have a little patience, please.