Celebrate New Year's Before Thanksgiving

Get a leg up on those Christmas-music-in-early-November nuts

Hester Qiang on Unsplash

Certain people find it permissible to get into the Christmas spirit before Thanksgiving. The clock strikes midnight, and no sooner have we turned the page from October 31st to November 1st, no sooner has the neighbor’s jack-o-lantern flickered out, no sooner have the kids come home and shorn the disguises of witch or vampire, princess or superhero, mermaid or mountain, and, pouring out the loot of the night, tallied up the chocolate-covered-fudgy-taffy-toffee-caramel-gumdrop-jelly candy confections that are sure to rot their darling little teeth right out of their darling little heads, than these people are already hanging up tinsel and mistletoe, decking the halls and fa-la-la-laing. As the last strains of “Monster Mash” fade out, they are already turning up the volume on “Jingle Bells.” They are insufferable. They have no decency. And, in the past few years, they have somehow managed to infect more victims with their virus, brainwash more innocents into their fiendish cult. The extremists—avert your eyes; it is too vulgar for print, but truth must out—begin (isn’t it nearly pornographic?) even before Halloween.

Now, if they had a sensible idea, like getting into the New Year’s spirit before Thanksgiving, then I might be more empathetic. In early November, it is perfectly reasonable, healthy, and sane, to start coming up with your New Year’s resolutions and clearing out the debris of the year of our Lord whatever. Make a Times Square in your own backyard, drop a ball, any ball will do, and loudly proclaim your new resolutions to anyone who will listen. After all, think of the resolutions you set way back in January. After two half-hearted mornings of huffing and puffing and panting and running-attempting, after three or four nights where you forced your eyes to follow dull line of text after dull line of text in the interest of improving your mind or intellect or soul while your fingers and brain secretly itched to grab that devil’s device beside you and get a good old-fashioned hit of dopamine, how much progress have you really made?

Toss them out. In two months you will accomplish nothing. Best to begin again and begin as soon as you can. While the rest of these suckers are mindlessly belting out the words to “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” you can begin to set your sights on loftier desires. As they say, the best time to start (for you will never be younger than you were then) is yesterday, and yesterday starts today. Let November be your January. For the really ambitious, let July. Skip a year and start a whole year ahead—leave the losers in the dust. While they plod along dully from day to day, living in the here-and-now, you, the truly modern man or woman, will be living in the there-and-later, enjoying the fruits of a growth that will be compounding away and bounding off into the stratosphere. Get started on your goals for five—ten—fifteen years from now. Read books that haven’t been published yet, watch movies that haven’t been filmed, send out wedding invitations when you and your spouse-to-be are only on your second date, pop champagne for a promotion that hasn’t even occurred.

Reset your clocks and calendars. There’s no time like the future. When someone asks you for the date, and you give them the date of two months or two years from now, you will be doing them a great favor. They will panic (what, January already?) and force time to bend to their own noble ambitions, all the happier for it. Or they might just send you to the madhouse, where you can finally brain all those Christmas-songs-before-Thanksgiving nutsos and claim, in your defense, insanity. Either way, the satisfaction of winning is yours.

from Sophie Calle’s Appointment at the Freud Museum.