It’s that time of year again. I can feel it in the air. Time for hot chocolate, lit fireplaces, sleigh rides, Santa wish lists, wreaths on windows, tacky sweater parties, Nativity scenes, stockings, gift searching, Christmas lights, eggnog and caroling.

Except— wait a second— it’s not even Thanksgiving.

I thought that we had some hope here in Bowling Green of keeping Christmas in its place — which is mid-to-late December, for those who have forgotten — but it seems that we too are not immune to the nation-wide “Let’s not wait for Christmas” cancer.

Piece of evidence #1: Cherry Hall is already wearing its red-ribboned and lighted wreaths. Every time I walk by that building, I feel as if I’m witnessing the poor soul who, at every party, drinks herself silly before the music even starts. Part of me wants to help her, to take her Miller Lite out of her hands and gently replace it with a glass of water — “let’s wait till everyone gets here, Cherry,” I’d say — but she is too tall and I’m already late for class. She’s too far gone for it to matter anyway.

Pieces of evidence #2 through #115: There are Christmas aisles, Christmas sections and Christmas decorations all across town. What was once a commercial faux-pas — my mom remembers a time when it was horrific to even think about Christmas before Thanksgiving — is now anything but an anachronism. Why wait for the Christmas season, we ask ourselves, when we can have an entire month (or five) to prepare ourselves for it? Why relish warm autumn colors when you can so easily replace them with banging reds and greens and golds? And why ask Santa to stay up north an extra month? He must be getting depressed this time of year, especially with the sun gone this half of the year.

So yes, I’m frustrated with the way we treat Christmas (I won’t even get into the religious implications), but I think that I’m more intrigued by our holiday leap-frogging of Thanksgiving. One day it’s Halloween and BAM! It’s Christmas-time. Thanksgiving is the one uniquely American holiday, and our materialistic — yes, I said it! — USA uses it only as a starting block for a shop-’til-you’re-bankrupt extravaganza.

But I think it is this commercial bypassing of Thanksgiving that sets the holiday apart, though I admit it would be neat to see cornucopias mass-produced and marketed by Puritans every year, or perhaps have Will Ferrell star as George Washington in a movie about the first nation-wide Thanksgiving (how would they work in a naked scene?).

Nope, somewhere deep down I believe our country recognizes that Thanksgiving is sacred, if only because we know that we cannot buy gratitude. It is intrinsically a celebration of each other and joy and blessings and another year of life spent together.