Golden Snow Globe?

From a distance, I thought this was a golden blow-up snow globe. The kind that should be placed in the front yard of this house at any moment...if the gods of gaudy commercialism listen to me at all. Problemo. I recently heard that the gods of gaudy commercialism [ggc] outsourced all their listening-to-mortals duties to a company that uses machine learning algorithms to listen for potential business ideas. The CEO of the company hands over these ideas to a get-rich-quick beer-drinking buddy who provides -- in return for each potentialy lucrative idea -- 5 complementary minutes with his shady in-house accountant. This creative number cruncher runs the beer-drinking buddy's back-yard fish farming company. (He'll pay you 1,000 bucks a month to raise catfish in your backyard pond and launder money through your kid's college fund.) All this to say that the gods of gaudy commercialism are M.I.A. in a big way. And that means you get no say in just how gaudy and tactless Christmas commercialism and marketing will get this year. It's wide open. Even though the gods of gaudy commercialism are not massaging commercial Christmas activity in any way these days, Jingle Bells is not yet playing in every store in the Western hemisphere. I haven't seen mamma kissin' Santa Claus...yet. Why is that? I don't know. Maybe there really is a point at which it's too early to go whole hog into Christmas. Maybe we need some marketing lubrication before our collective psyche can really handle three straight weeks of rudolph and santa. Maybe we NEED to go to jamba juice on November 8 and be greeted with "Merry citrus!" signs and "Its beginning to sip a lot like Christmas!" banners.

Maybe it's like vaccine coverage. Not everyone needs the Merry citrus messaging...just a critial mass.

And if the critical mass is adequately lubricated early enough, we can start thinking about the next major step in the downfall of western civiliaztion as we know it: Moving Thanksgiving from the fourth Thursday of November to the second.

Today happens to be the second Thursday of November. Happy New Thanksgiving. Tomorrow is the official start of the New Official Christmas Shopping Season. You only have a few hours to gather up your yoga mats, faux Mexican blankets and outdoor-strength fondue kits and head to WalMart to wait in line for a $19 DVD player.