Who Cares?

Thanksgiving this year is on November 28^th. Practically the latest it can be. And people are panicking as a result. Well, not people in general…retailers. They’re in a panic because with Thanksgiving so late, people won’t spend as much money on gifts. Or at least that’s how the thinking goes.

Now, I can see us regular folks being a little concerned because we don’t have enough time to do stuff to prepare for Christmas between November 28^th and December 24^th, but that’s only if you feel that you absolutely have to wait until the day after Thanksgiving to get started. I don’t, however see any of the people I know being concerned that the shorter span between this year’s late Thanksgiving and Christmas means that they’ll spend less. In fact, I don’t hear any of them heaving sighs of relief that with a shorter lead-up season, they won’t have to spend as much money as they would had Thanksgiving fallen earlier.

Quite frankly, I just don’t get it. What does when Thanksgiving falls have to do with how much people spend? Are people really that stupid that they’ll spend more money on Christmas gifts if given more time to do it?

I know that I’m not, and that’s because I was trained from an early age about what we used to call a Christmas Club. Now they’re called Holiday Clubs. It’s a special bank account where a set amount of money goes every week or every two weeks, and then at the beginning of November the money from that account is transferred to your regular bank account. It gives you a set amount of money to spend, no matter how many days there are between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

That’s right…a set amount. It doesn’t matter how many or how few days there are between Thanksgiving and Christmas, I am not going over that budget. Well…maybe I will by a hair, but still, the length of the Christmas shopping season doesn’t matter, because I’m spending the same amount of money, no matter what.

And I admit that sometimes I’ll see something way earlier in the year that I think someone would like, pick it up, and put it in the “Christmas Closet.” But that amount of money still gets deducted from what’s in the Holiday Club account.

The one exception is food gifts. In a bit of creative accounting, they tend to fall under grocery shopping. So if we can pick it, or the ingredients for it, up during our biweekly visit to Price Chopper, it gets in that way. That’s how teacher presents of cookies and coffee cakes are done.

So Thanksgiving is late this year. I don’t care.

After all, November 1^st falls the same time every year…and I’m ready!