Rant: Christmas

Christmas?! It's mid-September, for heaven's sake! You better believe it. The L.L. Bean Christmas catalog showed up in my mailbox yesterday. If that weren't enough, I also saw a table of Christmas cards at a local Borders. This is insane. I know that over the last decade or so, most retailers started to push holiday merchandise earlier and earlier before each holiday every year, but until now, it seemed that for the most part, at least they would wait until after Halloween to start on the Christmas stuff. Not this year, apparently. We still have Halloween and Thanksgiving to get through, but evidently those are getting short thrift this year in favor of the Big One. Or, worse, it will all be out at the same time, for a perfectly overwhelming scene. I bet global warming will kick in in earnest this year, too, so in a few weeks, we will be standing around in 85-degree heat, wearing shorts, not knowing whether to buy that plastic Jack-O-Lantern, a turkey-shaped candle, or splurge for the dancing Santa, since all three will be right in front of us.

All this is rife with cultural implications, but put those aside for a moment. It strikes me as suicide from a business point of view. First of all, who is going to think about Christmas shopping this early? Despite the ever-longer holiday shopping season, the number of folks fighting the crowds on Dec. 24th doesn't seem to get any smaller from year to year, so as a society, we clearly do not have any more foresight today than we did in the past. I am one of the biggest planners among my circle of friends, and I usually buy a fair number of presents, but even I refuse to start rolling until early November. Financially, people are still recovering from their summer vacations and back-to-school shopping. You know that catalog is going to get crumpled, torn, lost, or eaten by one of those adorable yellow labs it so prominently features. By the time people are ready to start thinking about gifts, it will be nowhere to be found, and for a company like L.L. Bean that depends so much on catalog sales, that will be disastrous. Unless, of course, they are planning to send out another one (or two, or three), wasting paper to print them and energy to ship them. The bombardment never stops, I guess.

Chocolate Notes
Tried Lindt's single-origin 75% dark chocolate from Ecuador last night. It was good -- less intense and more subtle than I expected. But I am wondering if it's not quite sweet enough. It's not that it's too bitter -- it's not -- but the sweetness I expect from a square of chocolate wasn't quite there. Amazing how much impact a miniscule difference in ingredient proprtions can have on the flavor of the finished product. Just about any chocolate with 71% or 72% percent cocoa content is delicious, but add an extra 3%, (a mere 4 grams or so) and the balance is tilted away from perfection. Uncharacteristically, J. declined to join me, so she couldn't offer a counterpoint. I suspect she would have been more excited about it.