No, no, no, it’s not time for ho, ho, ho

I wonder when Christmas in July will be a reality instead of just an expression?

Ghosts, goblins, vampires and politicians hadn’t even gotten out of the way before steamrolled by Hallowthanksmas and the advent of the shopping season. I refuse to say holiday season yet because it’s not the holiday season yet. Youngsters hadn’t even emptied their trick-or-treat treasures before the bombardment of what I dubbed “Gray Saturday” holiday sales hit us.

Seriously, there were pre-pre-pre-holiday sales the day after Halloween. Christmas music already can be heard in some stores. Kim and I were at Walmart on Sunday, and it’s already looking a lot like Christmas with a forest of Christmas trees, decorations galore, giant inflatable Santas and all the things that used to not appear until the day after Thanksgiving.

I have to admit I did like the giant inflatable dinosaur with a Santa hat and a gift in its mouth. In a moment of warpedness, I pictured the lawn of one of those folks who believe the world’s only 6,000 years old with a manger scene, the giant gift-bearing dinosaur and an inflated Santa among the shepherds and wise men.

Maybe I’m just old-fashioned when it comes to the holiday season, which to my thinking is from Thanksgiving through New Year’s. It’s supposed to work like this:

• Grocery stores have pre-Thanksgiving sales of turkeys, cranberry sauce, dressing ingredients, sweet potatoes and the components of green bean casserole. They start after Halloween

• On Thanksgiving Day, folks gather around the table to eat way too much, watch football and the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, which ends with the arrival of the Christmas season

• After Thanksgiving, people begin shopping for Christmas gifts, start putting up decorations and stringing enough lights until their houses look like Las Vegas casinos. There are parties and sales and Christmas festivities leading up to Christmas Eve, then families and friends get together for the evening, and the next day really celebrate the season

• There’s a week to recuperate from Christmas. On New Year’s Eve, the usual choices are to attend parties filled with great revelry to welcome the new year, or stay home, watch the specials, try to stay awake until midnight, shout “Whoopee!” and go to bed.

Each holiday gets its own attention, everything’s nicely separated, and there’s no confusion over which holiday you’re preparing for. But, nooooooo. We can’t just have holidays they way they’re supposed to be.

Giant corporations have to make more and more money for CEOs and executives and stockholders who already have more money than their great-grandchildren can spend. So, for the past several years, they’ve been inching the start of the “holiday season” earlier and earlier.

The day after Thanksgiving generally has been a busy shopping day for Christmas. Then someone got the idea to slap a name on it — Black Friday, because it’s a day when many stores turn a sizable profit compared to their regular business days. Black Friday started at dawn originally with early specials with customers crawling out of bed, going to buy $5 toasters and $50 TVs, then going home and back to bed.

That wasn’t good enough. Stores started opening earlier, with pre-dawn sales. Competition grew, and Black Friday started at midnight with hordes of shoppers pressing against store doors like zombies from Dawn of the Dead and stampeding when the doors open to get $7 toasters and $75 TVs.

Even that wasn’t good enough. Black Friday then edged into Thanksgiving night with stores starting sales at 10 p.m., then 9 p.m., and now there are stores having sales on Thanksgiving Day!

Before anyone could stop the madness, we started having pre-Black Friday sales, with Christmas promotions mixed with the turkey and cranberry sales. And the tide of greed spread until we now can find Freddy Kreuger and Santa Claus in stores at the same time.

At the rate this is going, I wouldn’t be surprised if, in a few years, pre-Christmas sales begin before the January post-Christmas white sales are finished.

And so everyone knows, I won’t be saying “Merry Christmas” or “Happy holidays” or “Kewl Kwanza” until after Thanksgiving, and my Christmas shopping won’t start until then, either. So, take that Corporate America!