Stretching the holiday season - retailers and mail order houses depend on stretching the holiday season - includes related article on Frosty Morning Tree Farm

American Demographics, Nov, 1997 by Tibbett L. Speer

Settling into her radio call-in show, shop-at-home expert Ginny Daly fields calls from her base in Potomac, Maryland. "What's the best way to find Christmas bargains?" one woman asks. "Which catalogs are offering the most Christmas items?" queries another. The questions aren't unusual. Their timing is. It's July.

Holiday extremists such as these make up a small but measurable segment of American society. Greatly outnumbering them are guilt-ridden counterparts who creep forth many months later. At a typical Kmart store, doors open at 7 a.m. on December 24th. They'll remain open until 8 p.m. Sheepish procrastinators rush through them until the last possible minute. In residential neighborhoods, exhausted express couriers deliver packages until a few hours before the arrival of St. Nick himself.

"It's never too early to shop early, and it's never too late to shop late," observes Daly, the Direct Marketing Association's point person on catalogs. Changes in consumer attitudes and technology have blurred the traditional holiday season, contorting its dimensions in ways unimaginable several decades ago. Like Santa Claus's belly, our holiday shopping season bulges far beyond what nature intended. And Santa's not going on a diet any time in the foreseeable future.

Celebrants

Most Americans (93 percent of adults) celebrate one December holiday or another, according to a survey conducted for American Demographics by Maritz Marketing Research. Christmas dominates the season, attracting 98 percent of celebrants. Two percent each celebrate Hanukkah and Kwanzaa. This adds up to more than 100 percent because a few people celebrate more than one holiday.

Our holiday spirit wanes with age. While 98 percent of those aged 45 to 54 celebrate a December holiday, just 88 percent of those aged 65 and older make the effort. The aging Grinch factor strongly affects consumption. Just 5 percent of people aged 35 to 44 say they buy nothing special for the holidays, compared with 19 percent of those aged 65 and older.

Wisdom comes with years, and so does the propensity to plan ahead. Just 3 percent of people aged 18 to 24 think about shopping more than six months in advance. By the time we hit 65, 18 percent of us are thinking of Santa in June. What we gain in sagacity, however, we may lose in spontaneity. One-third of young adults bought an unplanned gift because they unexpectedly saw something they liked, more than double the proportion of 55-to-64-year-olds who did so.

Rich people and poor people seem equally enthusiastic about the holidays. Money matters much less in general than gender and age when it comes to determining who'll shop early or late. Even so, on the day before the holiday, just 15 percent of people with incomes of $15,000 or less finish shopping, compared with 30 percent of people with incomes of $65,000-plus who may be less concerned with breaking the Christmas Club budget. Seventeen percent of this affluent group also splurged last year for express delivery.

Give people a chance to wait until the last minute, and they'll take it. The $46 billion catalog industry grows increasingly popular in our convenience-craving society. Catalogs accounted for 7.4 percent of general merchandise, apparel, and furniture sales in 1995, up from 4.7 percent in 1985, reports Everen Securities, a Chicago firm that monitors catalog stocks.

Men are the major culprits when it comes to last-minute spending. "I'm absolutely astounded at men. I'm ashamed!" exclaims Phil Wiseman, vice president of marketing for Maritz Marketing Research, Inc., in Fenton, Missouri. His reaction stems from review of nearly 1,000 telephone-survey respondents' descriptions of their holiday shopping behavior.

Men reveal a strong immunity to holiday fever for which they ultimately pay, big time. They start thinking about holiday shopping-just thinking, mind you-two-and-one-half months ahead of the Big Day. Such thoughts creep into the average woman's head nearly a month sooner. One in four men wait until one to three weeks before the holidays to start shopping. Another 6 percent start less than one week in advance. A noticeable but smaller share of women start shopping within three weeks of the holidays, too, 15 percent. But this equals the share of women who start shopping in July. Only 9 percent of men start this soon.

Men don't just start later, they wrap it up later, too. Twenty-four percent finish shopping on the eve of the holiday. A woeful 8 percent finish "on the day or later." Again, women aren't free from procrastinating tendencies, but they're less visible among the 11th-hour throngs. Twenty-one percent of women put things off until the last minute or later.

It Wasn't Always This Way

We've become so accustomed to blowout Christmases, it's difficult to realize how genteel the season used to be. Those who do remember marvel. Back then, Thanksgiving was Thanksgiving, a dignified holiday in itself, and not just a polite pause preceding the consumer orgy. By the time the turkey was roasting in the oven, Christmas catalogs would have been leisurely pored over, ordered from, and set aside.