In the old nursery rhyme,
Christmas is coming,
The geese are getting fat.
Few of us rely on fat geese any more as Christmas signals. Our indicators seem to come earlier and earlier and are already all around us. According to my calendar, there are still eleven days to Halloween and more than two months until Christmas.
I find it disconcerting to walk into stores with competing Halloween and Christmas displays and interesting that Hancock’s flyer in the Sunday paper had the Christmas fabric sales right below those for Halloween. Thanksgiving, my favorite holiday, gets squeezed into grocery ads or ignored altogether.
I’ll admit I’ve given up on this and have adopted an attitude of, “If you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em,” and am learning to juggle the holidays. I went to our church’s Fall Festival as a farmer Saturday afternoon and attended the first extra choir rehearsal for Christmas music on Sunday afternoon. I’ll probably even check out Hancock’s to see if I need to replenish my stash of Halloween and/or Christmas fabric.
Getting ready for Halloween, I need to stockpile for trick-or-treaters. For Christmas, I think I’ll also follow the rest of the rhyme’s suggestion and make charitable plans with hopes of doing better than a penny.
Please to put a penny in the old man’s hat;
If you haven’t got a penny, a ha’penny will do,
If you haven’t got a ha’penny, then God bless you!