It’s a cold, bright November morning. You’ve just woken up from a long night of Halloween celebration, be it partying, trick-or-treating with younger siblings (or adult friends), or even just watching horror movies while handing out candy. You turn on your TV, and what’s one of the first things you see? A Target commercial showing a little girl hanging out with a dog and some popular toys brought to life in a Christmas setting.

You brush it off, getting ready to go somewhere and deciding to get some coffee at Starbucks first. But as you walk in, you see they’ve already set up all of their Christmas decorations and are selling their special coffees to make on your own.

As the month of November progresses, it only gets worse. As more stores start advertising their Black Friday deals and layaway specials for Christmas, you then start to see houses with their lights up and decorations on the front lawn.

Every year it seems people start preparing for Christmas sooner and sooner, almost completely skipping preparation or advertising for Thanksgiving. At this rate, people will start getting ready for Christmas in October within the next few years.

It’s such a frustrating time when Christmas comes around, as people tend to go crazy when they’re out shopping for presents. Recently, there’ve been stories of employees from stores like K-Mart complaining of not being able to take Thanksgiving off.

But with so much excitement and planning around Black Friday, a lot of these people would probably just end up spending a lot of their Thanksgiving holiday camped out in line waiting to get in early Friday morning.

Another annoying issue with the holiday season is the music. Christmas music is a fun tradition, but with the broadcasting of it starting sooner and sooner, how are we supposed to continue enjoying it if we hear the music non-stop on the radio and in stores?

I love Elvis Presley’s “Blue Christmas” and Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas” as much as any other person, but after hearing it for the tenth time in just one day with over a month before Christmas, it gets old really quick.

The one thing that doesn’t happen before Thanksgiving is the early start of Christmas-themed movies and television shows. Channels like ABC don’t advertise for Christmas programs until December, still showing Thanksgiving some respect by promoting such programs as “A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving” rather than “A Charlie Brown Christmas Special.”

As Black Friday deals get better and people get antsier around this time of year, the holidays become less fun and become more of a hassle.

In order to make the holiday season last longer, let’s start decorating and preparing in December, not before Thanksgiving. Not only will Christmas not overstay its welcome, but we will be able to appreciate it better.