We’re all familiar with the fact that Christmas starts earlier and earlier every year.  The commercials, the decorations, the awesome holiday music in elevators and shopping malls, the special sales… it always starts earlier than the year before.  Last year it started around Halloween.  This year I think I saw the first Christmas commercial sometime in July.

Unfortunately, it didn’t work this year.  With the terrible economy, starting Christmas earlier than ever just couldn’t save this Christmas shopping season.  But perhaps we’ve been thinking in the wrong direction.  If we act quickly, there’s still time to save our retailers: we should postpone Christmas.

I know it’s hard to imagine Christmas on any other date.  But think of the upside!  A few more months of Christmas shopping might be just what the retailers need to pull through this recession.  Is it the retailers fault that our Founding Father’s stupidly put the inauguration after Christmas, depriving retailers of the benefit of the Obama stimulus package?  (How could Alexander Hamilton not have foreseen that a lame duck President would never pass an $850 billion stimulus package?) If Christmas were to come after January 20th, however, then our fellow depressed American citizens might have some fresh government cheese to spend on Tickle-Me-Elmos and PS3’s.  Can one think of a better way to celebrate the birth of The One than by placing a Christmas after the inauguration of The One?

But this is about more than helping retailers.  Between Halloween and the date formerly known as Christmas, people are kinder, houses and storefronts look prettier, and we have something to look forward to through the beginning of winter. And in past years, once the date formerly known as Christmas passed, all we were left with was snow, minimal sunlight, and gifts that you can’t return because you Aunt Matlida didn’t give you the gift receipt.  But we don’t have to be staring down 4 months of empty, cold winter.  Under my plan, we could be eagerly aniticipating 4 or 5 months of listening to “Feliz Navidad” in elevators and looking forward to that warm spring day when we’ll all sit under our trees and unwrap the presents.

We wouldn’t even need to bring our trees indoors because it would be warm enough to stand under a real tree!  How could the environmentalists not love that idea?!?

It won’t be easy.  I know what you’re thinking, “But Christmas is December 25.  It says so on my Cathy comic calendar.  How can we postpone Christmas?”  But in this time of national crisis, I think we must all make sacrifices, including not celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ on the fictional date that was arbitrarily assigned and instead celebrating it on another equally fictional and arbitrary date.

For the good of our country, let’s forget a white Christmas and let’s just keep shopping.