Out for his first Halloween trick-or-treating, little Johnny walks up to a house decorated with multicolored lights and plastic reindeer littering the front yard. Johnny holds out his pillowcase, a large smile spreading across his freckled face, ready to receive his candy. An old lady appears at the door and tosses a small carton of nonalcoholic eggnog into his pillowcase and smiles. "What a cute little Santa Claus you make!" she says.

In the week before Halloween, stores like Target and Wal-Mart begin abandoning Halloween decorations at a time when they should be pushing their merchandise. In their place appear Christmas decorations, from tree ornaments to tinsel, all for sale at discount prices.

So now it appears that Christmas actually begins in early October, while those pesky holidays like Halloween and Thanksgiving are thrown out in favor of one-day sales and new cutting-edge video games. Who needs the experience of trick-or-treating with your parents for the first time or bonding with family when you've got a new and improved Tickle-Me-Elmo?

In an attempt to make sure every penny disappears from the gullible public's pockets, such things as Christmas tree ornaments at Hallmark stores are selling at an average of over $20. Not only that, but your holiday decoration isn't complete without three miniature Christmas trees full of miniature ornaments, fake snow, wreaths of all shapes and sizes, music boxes, snow globes and other such paraphernalia. Nativity sets have now become optional below a Christmas tree—after all, we have to save room for all the cutting-edge popular toys, games and kitchen accessories to find on Christmas morning. And once we open all the presents, who has time to go to church and devote one hour to God on His birthday when the new Mario game is just waiting to be popped into your Nintendo Gamecube?

Some of this blame can be placed upon current times. One really can't trust their child to be safe walking around by himself in the dark of night when he might be kidnapped or receive caramel apples with razor blades in them. We live in a time when family values are at their lowest, and bickering clans find no reason to come together to celebrate such an abnormal thing as togetherness. So society fills this emptiness with stores and presents for Christmas, thinking it can compensate for the loneliness created by the absence of family or the worry caused by troubling current events.

I would continue to rant, but I'm way behind in my gift buying. Darn it, I should be watching Christmas in July on QVC and getting my gifts early.