There are elegant versions of Christmas décor and kitschy versions both, to me, are lovely in their own ways. Only during this time of year do we ornament trees, wreaths, and garlands with shining globes and gleaming baubles. The holiday also offers opportunities for engaging with beauty for its own sake.

Christmas is beautiful, and not strictly in the religious sense: As the days grow darker and the nights fall longer, spangling one’s dwelling in twinkling lights brings a sense of joy and comfort. Then there are the more personal explanations. (So goes my husband’s rationale for draping the house in strings of lights as soon as the last trick-or-treater heads home.) If your decorating regimen involves outdoor work, it’s also pleasant to get it done earlier in autumn, before it’s time to go caroling out in the snow.Ĭharlie Warzel: The case for keeping up your Christmas tree until March If you adore Christmastime and have spent several years accumulating decorations, you might as well get your money’s worth by enjoying them as long as you like. So have some patience with those of us who need a little Christmas right this very minute: a two-and-a-half-month Christmas really does have a few pleasures to recommend it.įirst, there are the practical reasons to deck the halls early. Maybe there is no good defense of getting into the Christmas spirit as early as I do-though I can’t help but feel a sense of kinship with those other handful of houses already decked out in lights before Thanksgiving.

Every position above has its merits, and none of them stops me from rockin’ around my Christmas tree starting November 1.

All of the arguments that chestnuts should not be roasting on an open fire in the month of November make sense to me: the nagging fact that retailers haul out the proverbial holly before Halloween has fully passed for purely commercial reasons, further cheapening an already materialistic mode of celebration the dilution of a particularly special time of year by stretching it to the point of exhaustion the infringement upon both Thanksgiving and the traditional Christian season of Advent, which each tend to be swallowed up by premature Christmas cheer the obnoxious recruitment of Christmas into the culture wars-think malicious wishes for a “merry Christmas”-that can make the entire season feel alienating and isolating.

Happy rockin around the christmas tree