As the spooky season comes to an end, the preparation for the next holiday begins. The main debate though is, which holiday do you start to prepare for after Halloween? For this week’s debate topic, I asked the question, “when should you start to prepare for Christmas? After Halloween or after Thanksgiving?” 

To gauge the opinion of the student body of Elizabethtown College, I decided to send out a poll to the members of my residence hall group chat. I defined preparing for Christmas as putting up decorations, listening to Christmas music, watching Christmas movies and having stores sell seasonal items. I also decided to personally go around and ask people what their opinion on this question was and took note of their responses. 

For someone who opposed preparing for Christmas immediately after Halloween, junior Natalie Meyer said, “There’s a whole month with another holiday in between. Definitely after Thanksgiving,” whereas on the other hand, junior Cassidy Rohrman, who supports preparing for Christmas after Halloween said, “I don’t think of Thanksgiving as a real holiday, so I choose to jump into the celebration of Christmas instead of waiting on Thanksgiving to be over first.” However, when analyzing the poll that I sent to the people who live in my residence hall, the results turned out to be strongly in favor of waiting until after Thanksgiving to prepare for Christmas. The total result was out of 22 votes, 17 people said that they would wait until after Thanksgiving and five people said that they would start after Halloween. 

I happen to agree with the majority that after Thanksgiving is the best time to start preparing for Christmas. Even though Christmas is an exciting time, there is a whole holiday in between Halloween and Christmas, so the public should hold off on celebrating for another couple of weeks. Though I also agree that Thanksgiving isn’t the most exciting holiday, and many people don’t celebrate it, it still has a good base principle of showing appreciation for what you have and for those around you, so maybe it would be better for the public to think about it a bit more instead of jumping headfirst into Christmas. Christmas also has a message of joy and appreciation, but it is often overshadowed by the corporate struggle of buying the best gift, making the best products or getting the most sales, so people often lose sight of the original meaning of Christmas.