Columnist Susan Snyder: Christmas on its way, pilgrim

Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2003 | 8:27 a.m.

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas.

Actually, it has looked that way since before Halloween.

Horrors.

My Halloween costume is still wadded up on a rocking chair in the corner, and we're still running from piles of leftover trick-or-treat candy that coworkers feel compelled to bring into the office.

But discount stores had aisles of Christmas decorations abutting aisles of frightful masks and makeup by the middle of October.

Have we lost our consumptive little minds?

We're not ready. But elves from the U.S. Christmas Consumer Stupor Bureau have decided this could be the shopping season to end all shopping seasons and have enacted a 12-week holiday bombardment plan that rivals the Luftwaffe.

What happened to Thanksgiving? I received a pencil from a vendor at a recent health fair and was nearly amazed to see it had "Happy Thanksgiving" and a turkey picture printed on it.

The woman who was giving them out said the the turkey pencils are hard to obtain and must be ordered really early to avoid being lost in the Halloween-Christmas rush.

Story ideas already abound on newspaper wire services. One package includes several articles about gift-giving ideas. Among them: "Regifting."

This involves taking unused gifts you received last year, rewrapping them and giving them to other people (who undoubtedly won't want them either) this year.

We're not ready, and we're also lazy -- too lazy to bother coming up with a decent gift idea for an occasion seven weeks distant.

Do you even know where the gifts you received last year are? In our circle of relatives, we're still trying to figure out how Thanksgiving logistics are going to work. We pretty much all agreed on one aspect of the holiday:

We're not ready.

A couple of friends are pushing for scheduling of a Christmas crafts get-together, which undoubtedly will involve many pots of paint, little wooden objects that need painting and a hot glue gun that will bind it all into some whimsical Christmas accoutrement that everyone simply must have.

Right.

I take a bunch of wood snowmen, paint, a hot glue gun and end up with something that sticks to the dining room table like an unwanted relative sticks to the guest room.

Even the federal government is planning ahead in a scary way. The Bureau of Land Management's field station in Caliente issued a statement Oct. 9 that 5,000 permits were available for people who wanted to cut down their Christmas trees on BLM-administered public land outside of wilderness area boundaries.

They are available on a first-come, first-served basis through Dec. 24. Call (775) 726-8100 for information. Mail-in requests will be accepted only until Nov. 21. That's about a week before Thanksgiving.

For those who have forgotten, Thanksgiving is a holiday on which we celebrate the arrival of the Pilgrims (or the beginning of the end if you're an American Indian). It happens between Halloween and Christmas.

And it lasts about four hours, judging by the current marketing schedule.