Just three months before November, everyone seemed to crave the sweet embrace autumn brings. The smell of freshly carved pumpkins, brown leaves crunching under shoes, warm, pumpkin spiced coffee and the beginning of school.
Fall has been romanticized for many years, the popularity of Pinterest making autumn feel like a cozy escape punctuated by fun activities and delicious foods as well as the “Christian Girl Autumn” aesthetic which emphasizes pumpkin spiced lattes and fuzzy sweaters.
Many book publishing companies and movie studios even use the anticipation for the fall season to push out cozy novels and scary movies. Students use fall’s aesthetic in order to romanticize the daily routines of schoolwork.
Fall has become a much loved and anticipated season, so why does it seem like it ends earlier each year?
It seems the minute Halloween ends so does fall. Even though technically fall ends November 30, the month of November seems to be slowly falling under the umbrella of winter and who knows how long it’ll be before October gets infected.
One of the key factors in November’s sinification to winter must be the Mariah Carey effect. Mariah Carey, someone no one seems to think about until they have to, is the harbinger of Christmas, and winter as a whole, due to her annoyingly catchy song, “All I Want for Christmas is You” (AIWFCIY).
Carey has milked the success of the song for years, even going as far as making videos in which she’s “defrosting.” Where, like clockwork, Carey releases a video in which she announces the “start” of the Christmas season using her hit song as background.
This year, Carey posted an Instagram reel in which a myriad of Halloween creatures use blowdrivers on the frozen block Carey’s frozen in. After a couple seconds, Carey’s high pitched note cracks the ice and “AIWFCIY” starts to play as Carey smiles in money.
Speaking of money, Carey makes an average of three million dollars a year, according to the New York Post, for a song that should only be playing for a good 25 days, but now plays for 35 days. So, like all things, are the seasons being manipulated purely out of greed?
Not to say that Carey is the primary reason that winter is starting sooner or that she herself invented capitalism, but it does say a lot that the only time she is relevant is when that song is playing.
With “AIWFCIY” playing everywhere, it seems to signal to other companies to shell out their holiday wares months early. This includes companies like Starbucks, who are masters at celebrating seasons before they even occur.
On November 2, Starbucks released their holiday drink selection, only a day after Carey defrosted, alerting the collective hive mind of the American people to the imminent holiday season.
Is Starbucks just a bandwagon using Carey’s success to smuggle their overpriced and under caffeinated drinks to the public without being shunned?
There are companies that don’t even need Carey in order to display holiday themed items. Target, for example, sections off whole sections in order to show off their flashy ornaments and their pine tree rugs.
This year, a holiday section popped up in Target like clockwork in early October, not even allowing shoppers time to mourn the loss of October. How are people supposed to grapple with the war that is drinking a venti iced chai while strolling down an aisle chock full of fuzzy reindeers?
Target has also been pumping out Black Friday commercials, as have many other companies including Walmart, that display shiny, plastic toys with their prices slashed in half; a happy family of bland actors celebrating holidays with said gifts.
But Black Friday has been picked apart as a “holiday,” spanning weeks instead of the picture perfect post Thanksgiving day that so many different television shows love to poke fun at. While I don’t necessarily miss “celebrating” the day, I am peeved that one of the only barriers that corporate America could respect has been taken apart due to well played marketing.
Another facet of this issue is that Thanksgiving is no longer a politically correct holiday to celebrate loudly. It seems only a few years ago that the majority of people realized that the true roots of Thanksgiving derive from years of genocide and colonization imposed on First Nation peoples by European colonists.
Thanksgiving is one of those holidays that doesn’t get some of the marketing the others did. This year alone, Christmas is reported to make almost one trillion dollars from cards, presents, wrapping paper and more.
Thanksgiving never gets that treatment. No cards or toys are exchanged, just some heavy food and millions of dead turkeys.
Because Thanksgiving seems to be such an uninteresting holiday to people, it doesn’t seem to take its place as a fall holiday, letting the capitalist powers of Mariah Carey and Starbucks to pave the way for winter’s rise.
So what can people do about this?
It seems to be next to nothing because 80% of people are looking forward to winter, not caring they have to trudge through another autumn month before they can celebrate their precious holidays, so it seems my opinion is in the minority.
But I believe we should try to savor November in little ways by trying to call out the capitalist nature of the transition, acknowledging how and why this is happening.
