The usual suspects started the long slog toward the holidays on Nov. 1 — namely, retailers, to whom the Christmas season isn’t just a celebration of peace and joy, but a substantial portion of the annual sales tally and the difference between a down year and a profitable one.
The annual Christmas push worked at noticeably different speeds, though. At the Smith’s supermarket in my neighborhood, Christmas gift wrap started pushing the Halloween candy off the shelves in the seasonal aisle in the last days of October. But at the Target I frequent, the Halloween costumes were still up a week into November, though at sharply reduced clearance prices — though by this week, red-and-green had supplanted orange-and-black as the dominant color scheme.