Holiday Overlap

When Santa Claus arrives at Herald Square later this morning in Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, it represents the utmost visual concurrence of two holidays.  It is simultaneously both Thanksgiving and Christmas in the most natural sense of the intersection.

In the holiday season we rapidly progress from Halloween to Thanksgiving to Christmas to New Year's, without well-defined delimiters.  Cashier isle magazines have already been changed to their Thanksgiving issues before Halloween even arrives.  Fortunately Halloween and Thanksgiving both contain elements of harvest festivals and so the blend is natural.  I view pumpkin pie has having the greatest cross-over appeal.  It is a kind of final stage of the pumpkin cycle - evil Jack O'Lanterns redeemed into sweet dessert.

Much has already been said of Christmas creep.  I think it nothing to hear Christmas music in the malls mid-November.  But now Christmas has increasingly cannibalized November, so that preparations for decorations in stores have begun before I've even put my pumpkin out.

I endeavored to identify items with a foot in both Halloween and Christmas.  I thus present, to the best of my knowledge, the overlap of Halloween and Christmas:

• Tim Burton's "The Nightmare Before Christmas"
• B-Horror film "Jack Frost"
• The Ghost of Christmas Future
• Sexy Santa, Ms. Claus, or Elves costumes
• The song "Linus and Lucy", featured in both the Halloween and Christmas Charlie Brown specials
• Late October in many stores

Happy Thanksgiving!!!