Santa Claus is coming to town — but earlier than you think
Christmas comes earlier every year.
Bah humbug.
Halloween jack-o-lanterns are still grinning from front stoops, Thanksgiving is two weeks away and already zealous neighbors are competing to put their lights up first. Christmas fanatics are scoping out the Christmas tree situation — will there be a shortage and where will the finest Fraser firs be on sale?
To compound holiday season stress, there are six fewer shopping days this year because of the late Thanksgiving date of Nov. 28. Retailers aim to drive sales with early online discounts. Consumers will have just 26 post-Thanksgiving days to buy, mail, wrap — not to mention bake cookies, send cards, dig out the fake mistletoe and watch “It’s a Wonderful Life” for the 40th time.
Is your blood pressure rising? Santa Claus isn’t getting any younger, either.
“Feels like Christmas started in July,” said Alex Rodriguez-Roig, president of the Boys and Girls Clubs of Miami-Dade, which will begin selling 5,000 trees from its Hank Kline Unit on Nov. 25. The lot sells out earlier every year — last year by Dec. 13. “The stores have their Christmas sections up right next to their Halloween sections. The theme parks in Orlando have their Christmas decorations up immediately after Halloween. I think people love the Christmas spirit — the good cheer, the nostalgia. They can’t get enough of it so they want to extend it.”
Rodriguez-Roig said the clubs’ premium-quality trees from a small group of trusted growers have not yet been cut, but “most chain-store trees were cut a couple weeks ago and are sitting on a loading dock because they’ve ordered 500,000 trees.”
For those who do not procrastinate like the rest of us, or who really crave the evergreen scent, many Christmas tree sales spots opened over the weekend. But Arturo Martin opened his tents in Olympia Heights and Miami Gardens on Nov. 9.
“The early bird gets the worm,” Martin said while helping a customer choose an 8-footer. “Inside our house we still have fall decorations. Outside we just put away our Halloween decorations. I told my daughter to pick up all the bones in the yard. Then I threw out our pumpkins and my wife got angry: ‘Too soon!’ she said. I said, ‘Hey, believe it or not, Christmas is here.’
“I think Thanksgiving is getting lost in the Christmas frenzy. Black Friday is our biggest day for tree sales.”
Juan de Dios San Martin and his family win the prize for Most Organized Holiday Decorators. They bought the 10-foot tree adorning their front hallway a week ago. On Thursday, they were putting up lights and erecting three new large inflatables — a snowman, a penguin and a Santa — under the palms in their front yard next to a large pumpkin-wielding headless horseman and ghost-infested haunted house still on display.
“The decorations make the house look happy and it’s a tradition that allows us to spend time together on a fun project,” said de Dios San Martin, who is home in Miami on vacation from college in Bilbao, Spain, where the Basque version of Santa is Olentzero, a stout farmer who carves wooden toys and brings them to children in a sack.
Why do they start celebrating seven weeks before Christmas?
“We prefer to buy everything early to avoid the hassle and crowds before la gente se pone mas loca,” he said — before everybody goes crazy.
Christmas tree sellers expect their inventory to go fast again this year as there is strong demand for natural trees combined with a tight supply that originated with the Great Recession in 2008 when fewer people bought trees and farmers lacked space to plant seedlings. It takes up to 10 years to grow a Christmas tree. Consequently, the crop shortage is expected to last another year or two, especially for premium trees. Average tree prices are projected to spike at $84 on Cyber Monday, but if you can hold out until the week before Christmas, they are expected to drop 29 percent to an average of $50.
Some of the small farmers who grow the nation’s 27.4 million Christmas trees each year left the $2 billion industry when lagging prices from 2000 to 2015 failed to keep pace with increasing production costs, according to the National Christmas Tree Association. In Oregon, which grows 30 percent of the nation’s trees, some farmers have converted to a more profitable crop — cannabis. South Florida gets most of its trees from North Carolina.
Rodriguez-Roig remembers his family’s very first tree, from their first Christmas in Miami after moving from Cuba. His father didn’t know that Christmas trees don’t grow in Miami.
“He knew of the American tradition of chopping down your own tree, so he went to the neighborhood park, cut down a tree, dragged it home, and we decorated it,” Rodriguez-Roig said. “But it wasn’t a real, balanced Christmas tree, so in the middle of the night we heard loud popping noises. We ran out and saw that the tree had fallen over and the ornaments broke when they hit the floor. Every year when we choose our tree we get a lot of laughs out of that story.”
It’s only mid-November but malls are being decked to capitalize on the shopping season. When you buy your Thanksgiving turkey, you’re likely to hear Christmas carols piped through the aisles and see employees wearing Santa hats. A Salvation Army bell-ringer was sighted at a Publix on Friday.
Want to feel jolly round the clock through the New Year? SiriusXM is playing holiday music 24/7 on 15 channels, including Country Christmas and Rockin’ Xmas. Sirius started streaming tunes the day after Halloween.
