Christmas Music on Repeat - Before Thanksgiving! 😡

While we've been out and about this past week, at stores and restaurants, many have been playing Christmas music on repeat. Christmas music?? It's not even Thanksgiving yet!

It used to be that the day after Thanksgiving, "Black Friday", was the start of the commercial Christmas season. I hate the way retailers have leap-frogged the holidays so that now Christmas selling starts even before supermarkets load up on turkeys.



Years ago my dad remarked, "Thanksgiving is the one holiday they haven't corrupted." "They" meant Corporate American, particularly the retail sector; and "corrupt" meant change in purpose from whatever religious or other solemn significance various holidays were once well understood to have, to being all about exhortations to buy, BUY, BUY to prove to everyone how much you love them.



Well, "they" did finally corrupt Thanksgiving.... Not by corrupting Thanksgiving itself but by driving over it with Christmas. Now stores begin Christmas advertisements after Halloween and play Christmas music nonstop in November.



Will anyone else join me in saying, "Stop"?

Smooth Sailing on Thanksgiving Eve

"Thanksgiving Eve"... is that a thing? I think you know what I mean, though: the night before Thanksgiving. It's one of the bigger travel days of the year (Sunday following Thanksgiving is the biggest) when people travel to visit friends or relatives elsewhere in the country. Most hit the roads and airports in the evening, after finishing the school- and work day, and travel late into the night to be there in time for holiday dinner on Thursday.

I remember so many Wednesday evening trips when traffic was a complete mess. Delays often added hours to the drive. I braced for that last night as we prepared to drive from Washington, D.C. to my inlaws' house in Harrisburg, PA.

"It's showing 2 hours 15 minutes," Hawk noted early in the day, referring to what mapping apps indicated at the time.

"Yeah, but we'll see how bad it is at 4 or 5pm," I warned. Internally I was prepared for our 2h15m drive to take 4 hours or longer due to holiday traffic.

Well, 5:30pm came around (we stayed in DC later than expected) and maps apps showed that our 2:15 drive had grown to... 2:17. LOLWUT?!

Indeed, Thanksgiving Eve traffic was... on holiday 😉... this year. From 14th & C Streets SW in downtown DC we drove south across the 14th Street Bridge with no traffic and looped onto the George Washington Parkway headed north. Traffic on the parkway moved at the speed limit until the right lane slowed down a bit for the exit ramp onto the Beltway (I-495). The Beltway was slow for a few miles as it crossed the bridge into Maryland but never stop-and-go; and it sped up to the limit as we neared the I-270 split. Commuter-heavy I-270 flowed smoothly, its monstrous 12 lane width doing what it was designed to do (i.e., keep us all moving). And even as it narrowed down from 12 lanes to 8 to 6 to just 4 (2 in each direction) further north, the volume of traffic tapered down with it such that I rarely dipped below the speed limit.

The only delay on our trip was stopping for dinner and impulse shopping in Germantown, MD. I'd figured we'd stop for dinner anyway... but as a much-needed break from driving in bad traffic. Instead it was leisurely. That stop pushed back arrival at my inlaws' house to 9pm. Still, it was early enough to stay up and chat with them for a few hours, rather than us arriving 2 hours later and wanting to go straight to bed.