Companies like Wal-Mart, Target, Old Navy, American Eagle, Pier One and others are dictating your purchases. Perhaps you are unaware but stop and take into consideration the amount of Christmas paraphernalia you are exposed to whenever walking through the doors of the aforementioned stores.

Granted, hearing Bing Crosby can be relaxing and help one reminisce of happy, childhood times wearing flannel pajamas, baking sugar cookies and dreaming sugar plums the night before Santa came bringing you that Malibu Barbie or G. I. Joe you always wanted.

Is it really necessary to start reminding yourself of the Christmas season as early as Halloween? People walk through stores looking for garbage bags, face wash, or duck tape and are overwhelmed with the Christmas carols, decorations and overall paraphernalia earlier each year.

The reason for this gradual slide of Christmas into the once cherished and newly forgotten holidays is simple: People keep buying the Christmas stuff each time stores begin putting them out to keep up with the Joneses, Smiths and Patels. So, in the simplest logic possible, the stores recognize the potential money due to past shopping season successes only because people keep spending more money on Christmas earlier and earlier.

Supply and demand. Why not eradicate the need for After Christmas Sales by allowing people to buy almost all your stock before the Christmas Rush ever happens? Quite frankly, the large retailing corporations are geniuses because they have figured out how to make a fool part with their money. You buy it, they push it and the cycle continues each year until people, who haven’t been buying into the early shopping madness, begin complaining vocally and feeling a bit ostracized for being a nonconformist in the grand design of the prequel to the Christmas shopping phenomenon.

The next time you walk into a retailer and notice all the fuzzy snowmen, red-nosed reindeer and jolly ole Saint Nick, you can appreciate the inappropriateness behind the Christmas season’s extension. Christmas is a grand time of year that should be more than just capitalistic ventures to end the year in the green instead of the black. Show the companies you want the old, childhood memories of Christmas to return instead of the deplorable and apprehensible treatment it has been receiving as of late. Otherwise, there really will be a Christmas in July and we can all take some sort credit for this holiday becoming trivial and mundane.