Winter in July |

The high profile PR office of a prominent commercial site sent me at the end of July an email about the site's presents for this Christmas.

The email contained images of rather expensive interior design objects perfect for your (Christmas) holidays and a PDF document featuring some supposedly fun descriptions of the above mentioned objects. I raised an eyebrow when I saw the message, opened the attach, had a look at the images, then promptly selected the email and erased it forever from my email box while singing Bomb the Bass’ "Winter in July" in my mind.

I’ve always liked Christmas, but the words “Christmas Shopping” conjure up terrible visions of people losing every inch of humanity every weekend between October and December in department stores and High Street shops.

I never suffered of panic attacks, but the words “Christmas Shopping” make me feel nauseous and anxious and have the power of sending me into a feverishly panicky state.

But if Christmas Shopping and its visions of hordes of people fighting to buy useless stuff makes me anxious, the idea of starting the Christmas shopping or even starting to think about it in July made me even sicker.

But it wasn’t over yet: as you may have heard, Selfridges London recently opened its Christmas shop complete with greeting cards, tree baubles and plastic reindeer covered in colourful and shiny glitter (image from The Guardian site). Yes, I admit I find Christmas shops open all over the year and based in places like Edinburgh’s Royal Mile as a fun experience for tourists, but this is slightly too much for me.

It may be obviously cool for tourists passing through London buying an irresistible "Made in China" Christmas decoration 6 months in advance as a memento of their summer trip to the glorious English capital, but this is clearly the umpteenth attempt at denying the state of things.

We all know from reports that sales weren’t great last Christmas and that even companies producing chocolate eggs performed rather badly at Easter. Yet, rather than admitting that the financial crisis never passed and that we have alienated the consumers by offering things that are not even desirable, we have now passed to another strategy, anticipating Christmas shopping even earlier hoping that silly consumers will buy more having more time to spend their money.

Maybe they think in Summer we are more willing to depart from our hard-earned money than in Autumn/Winter (though I never really thought that the sun could make us not only more cheerful but also more willing to splash our money on things we don't need…). Then again, judging from the recent stock markets' roller-coaster-like performances and the US debt crisis, we may as well start not only doing the Christmas shopping, but actually celebrating Christmas a little bit earlier this year: after all, if things go as bad as this, we may not even get to December. Fancy a Christmas cracker?

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