Is Christmas season starting earlier?

By Paul Collins

SLATE

It’s the kind of jump-the-gun October ad that brings the same excuse, year after year: “This may SEEM a little premature to you — but it really is NOT … ” Ah, yes: It’s once again the time of year when retail giants begin their insistent reminders that there are “not many days left in which to do your Christmas buying.”

But here’s the catch: This ad ran in 1912.

The gripe about Christmas coming “earlier every year” is a hardy media perennial across decades and borders, as British complaints in 1954 and American ones in 1968 about September Santas attest. But the practice of pushing early shopping is much older — older, even, than that 1912 ad — and the blame goes to everyone from retailers to rabble-rousers to the U.S. government.

Nothing new

Like so many of our retailing habits, early shopping dates back to the late Victorians. Along with inventing cash registers, mail-order catalogues, and escalator-filled flagship stores, the Victorians also discovered the value of starting the Yuletide shopping season before Thanksgiving. A Nov. 19, 1885, ad by South Carolina retailer Wilhite & Wilhite already shows the familiar combination of apology and all-caps hucksterism: “KEEP IT IN MIND! It is needless to remind you that CHRISTMAS IS COMING, But we want everybody who intends purchasing CHRISTMAS PRESENTS to comprehend that we are now all ready … “

It was only a short leap from ad copy to in-store blowouts. A Nov. 16, 1888, event by the Kansas City, Mo., emporium Bullene, Moore, Emery & Company saw a preholiday rush that “packed every square foot of the store,” while promotions for an 1893 “Early Christmas Event” by one Salt Lake City retailer almost reads like a ransom note: “This is no joke. We mean it. We will do it … MONDAY, MONDAY, MONDAY.”

Inevitably, complaints followed. The problem, then as now, was not the idea of shopping before Thanksgiving — that barrier had already toppled—but the more heated question of pushing past another holiday and into the precincts of Halloween. Sioux City, Iowa, merchants were berated in 1901 for revving up Christmas sales in mid-October, and that same season saw the Philadelphia Inquirer sighing the annual complaint that “Gift buying has begun in earnest — seems to get earlier every year.”

Early shopping might have faded into history like other Gilded Age excesses were it not for the arrival of an utterly counterintuitive player into our story: progressive titan Florence Kelley. Better known today as a co-founder of the NAACP — and for teaming up with Upton Sinclair and Jack London to start the Intercollegiate Socialist Society — Kelley also has a special place under the historian’s Christmas tree. Her widely distributed 1903 essay, “The Travesty of Christmas,” was not, as you might expect from a socialist suffragette, an attack on early shopping — it was in support of it.

Because it was kinder

The December rush on stores, Kelley explained, brought “a bitter inversion of the order of holiday cheer” for overwhelmed clerks and delivery boys. Early shopping was part of Kelley’s crusades for child labor laws and an eight-hour workday, because the last few weeks before Christmas were exactly when overtime and seasonal child labor were most abused. The employment of messenger and delivery boys especially appalled her, as these were the “many children for whom the cruel exposure attending their holiday work is followed by nervous prostration, or pneumonia, too often ending in tuberculosis.”

Kelley’s mass movement, the National Consumers League, turned their “Shop Early Campaign” into a progressive juggernaut over the next decade: Tens of thousands of posters were distributed in cities each year to halt “the inhuman nature of the eleventh-hour rush” on sales clerks. Cities were annually plastered with “Do Your Christmas Shopping Early” signs — “they are everywhere,” a wire service reported from New York City in 1913.

Savvy merchants were quick to adopt the Shop Early Campaign, which made for strange bedfellows: Shop Early was promoted by retail clerk unions and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce alike. And as ever, a few retailers were ready to push beyond even these new boundaries of good taste. One 1914 Hoosier Cabinet ad coyly appealed to American wives: “Just Wink your Christmas eye at Mr. Husband and say ‘Hoosier.’ ” The ad ran in August.

The Council of National Defense wants it

The transformation of the early shopping movement was complete by 1918, when the Council of National Defense backed early buying to ease transport and labor shortages — and ran jaw-dropping ads of Santa Claus in a doughboy uniform, urging Americans to “Take the Crush out of Your Christmas Shopping and Put It Into Winning the War.”

Retailers’ fondness for early shopping meant that these efforts were kept up after the war, too. One Albuquerque, N.M., retailer in 1920 demanded, with unanswerable logic, “If Christmas Came Tomorrow, Would You Be Ready?” Americans were: Shop Early drives roared through the 1920s and 1930s, and the Washington Times even held prize contests for schoolchildren to write 100-word essays on “Why Everybody Should Do Their Christmas Shopping Early.” The notion continued making wartime surges, with the postmaster general urging Americans in August 1943 to shop “really early, indeed right now” — a situation revisited in the Vietnam War.

By then, early Christmas shopping had fermented into the potent historical brew of idealism, patriotism, and sheer retail gluttony that we know today. Uneasiness over November shopping and outright ire over September and October sales are now some of America’s oldest Yuletide traditions. Like the annual unwrapping of a fruitcake or an ugly sweater, the idea that Christmas “comes earlier every year” is entirely predictable, bound by tradition — and yet somehow always surprising to us.

Collins teaches creative writing at Portland State University, and his latest book is “The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City and Sparked the Tabloid Wars.” 

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