🌀 It's Time

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The skeleton is still standing on the lawn next door. Your tree is already up.

It went up November 1, the morning after the last trick-or-treater, with the candy bowl still by the door. Mariah Carey had thawed at midnight. By breakfast, your feed had swapped pumpkins for plaid, and you were in the garage pulling the box down from the rafters.

Your sister texted a skull emoji. A coworker asked if you'd skipped Thanksgiving on purpose. You said it makes you happy, which is true, and it still came out sounding like a confession.

Nobody made the neighbors explain a skeleton in September. So why does a tree in November need an alibi? And who decided how long a holiday is allowed to last?

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In Thebes in the 1400s BC, once a year in the flood season, priests carried the god Amun out of his temple at Karnak in a sacred boat. They brought him about three kilometers south, to the temple at Luxor. Soldiers, sailors, singers and acrobats came along. Crowds watched from the riverbanks, and some hoped the god would answer a question.

This was the Opet festival. Under Thutmose III, who ruled from 1479 to 1426 BC, it lasted 11 days. About 250 years later, Ramesses III had the dates carved into the great festival list at his temple at Medinet Habu, and by then Opet filled 24. By the end of his reign, it had probably reached 27, nearly a whole month in a calendar of 30-day months.

Every extra day came with a bill. One three-week festival of the period called for more than eleven thousand loaves of bread and cakes. The festival grew as far as the granaries could carry it.

Read it from the inside. For those days the god left his house and came out where people could see him, and the king's right to rule was renewed in public. More days meant more of both. In the records from Egypt's imperial centuries, Opet only got longer.

Every society runs on two clocks. Ordinary time is for work, chores and saving up. Festival time is when the rules loosen, the group gathers, and spending becomes the point. People prefer the second clock, and whenever they can afford more of it, they buy more.

That makes the length of a holiday a rough reading of what a society can spare. Opet stretched while Egypt ran an empire. The American Christmas season stretched too, and the people who tried to hold it back lost. Massachusetts banned Christmas in 1659, with a five-shilling fine for feasting or skipping work, and the law was gone in 22 years.

The fight over the start date is older than Mariah. In 1939, retailers wanted a longer shopping season, and Franklin Roosevelt moved Thanksgiving up a week. The move set off a national argument, and in 1941 Congress fixed the holiday to the fourth Thursday. In a November with five Thursdays, that still hands the stores the extra week.

This fall, Fall Back argued that a clock is right when it matches the neighbors, and Twelve Feet of Bones met a skeleton that never comes down. The November tree is a household that stopped waiting for the neighbors. What once took a city's grain now takes a box from the garage.

The season now has an opening ceremony. At midnight on November 1, Mariah Carey posted her annual "It's Time" video, this year opening as a punk singer before the sleigh bells hit. The agency New Engen calls the clip Instagram's official start to the holiday season, and this week it reports the platform is fully in holiday mode.

How many people actually decorate early depends on who's asking. An Ipsos poll for Rocket Mortgage and Redfin in October 2025 found 15% of Americans put decorations up before Thanksgiving. A 2023 Today's Homeowner survey of 3,000 put it at 34% of people who decorate. Either way, it's a minority, and a sizable one.

Stores settled the question long ago. The National Retail Federation counts the holiday season from November 1 and expects it to pass a trillion dollars this year, at $1.013 trillion. In its October survey of 8,094 adults, 43% of holiday shoppers planned to start before November.

Look at the reason they gave. Half of those early shoppers said they start early to spread their budgets out. The season is getting longer partly because households need more weeks to pay for it.

Quote: "Once December was a month; now it is a year." Seneca, Moral Letters to Lucilius 18 (first century AD), trans. Richard M. Gummere.

Study: In a Dutch study of 1,530 adults, people with a trip coming up were happier than those staying home, likely from anticipation. Back home, most were no happier than the stay-at-homes (Nawijn and colleagues, Applied Research in Quality of Life, 2010).

Artifact: Christkindleins Haus, a 1920 Munich advent calendar. It started on December 6 with 18 windows and one big Christmas door. Today's standard calendar starts December 1, so even the countdown grew.

If a festival grows as far as a society can afford, what does a two-month Christmas say about this one? And once a season starts whenever enough households decide it has, who still gets to call it too early?

The tree on November 1 looks like impatience, or a marketing department winning. Set it beside Thebes and it looks like the oldest vote people cast: more festival, less ordinary time. Egypt stretched Opet from 11 days to 27 for as long as it could feed the crowds. Massachusetts outlawed Christmas and repealed the ban 22 years later.

What changed is the price. A god's procession needed thousands of loaves and a city's labor. A season now needs a box from the garage and a video at midnight.

So the skeleton outside and the tree inside can overlap for a week. Ordinary time never wins the vote. It just waits for January.

Forward this to the friend who texted you their tree on November 1. Tell them Ramesses III would have given it 27 days.

Find yourself in the next one,

Eren.

The Receipts

The artifact

The numbers

The quote, the study and the artifact