There are 52 days until Christmas.

Depending on your perspective, 52 days might sound like forever, or like no time at all. Either way, the Christmas season is upon us again, most especially in the commercial world.

What I consider the “classic” Christmas commercials, like the Hershey Kisses ringing “We Wish You a Merry Christmas,” and the Coke polar bears, normally start popping up around mid-November.

So I was somewhat taken aback when I saw an Oct. 6 ad on TV for Walmart’s layaway feature for the holidays.

I’m confused. Do people really start shopping for Christmas gifts in October?

It seems like nowadays there is no such thing as “too early” when it comes to Christmas. Before Halloween was even over, H-E-B already had an aisle of candy canes and Christmas ornaments, and Hobby Lobby has been in full-force Christmas mode since at least August.

Why is it necessary to prepare for Christmas for nearly half of the year?

Don’t get me wrong, I love Christmas. There has been a countdown on my chalkboard since school started this fall, and I have already given into the temptation to giddily peruse Hobby Lobby’s Christmas section.

Christmas is hard to resist.

There’s an alluring quality about the holiday season that makes some people want to bring out the Christmas tree, twinkling lights and tinsel before school even starts in the fall. As a result, the world of advertising feeds off our impatience for Christmas and starts to overlap other holidays, like Halloween and Thanksgiving, just to get to Christmas faster.

After Thanksgiving is over, no time is wasted in starting the “official” Christmas shopping season. At 3 a.m. on Black Friday at any Best Buy, Target or other department store, the mad rush officially begins.

The Christmas shopping season doesn’t even end at Christmas because you can go out and find all of the picked-over after-Christmas sales you could ever want.

If you think about it, the whole year is one giant push toward Christmas. It starts right after New Year’s.

Midnight will have barely struck on Jan. 1st, and then all of a sudden it’s time for Valentines Day. After that, the Easter baskets and chocolate bunnies reappear.

Soon enough it’ll be May and time to get ready for the Fourth of July. Once summer is over, Halloween doesn’t get much time to stand on its own before it has to make way for “the holidays.”

The weeks before December are like when you’re out to dinner, stomach grumbling, with a plate full of food in front of you, but you don’t want to be rude and eat before everyone else has their food. So you start picking at your food because you just can’t resist it, so when it’s finally time to eat, you’ve already picked away at half of your food.

Eating those little pinches piece by piece never tastes as good as eating the whole meal all at once.

If we celebrate Christmas from August through December, we dilute the joy and excitement that comes with the Christmas season.

So as excited as I am about starting Christmas celebrations, I think I can wait at least until I’ve finished my Thanksgiving dinner.

Robyn Sanders is a junior journalism major from Corpus Christi and is a reporter for the Lariat.