The Menu
When does Christmas start for you? On October 20, 2026, I asked Substack and Threads when Christmas music would be acceptable in your house, and I provided a menu of four options to choose from: November 1st, after U.S. Thanksgiving, the first Sunday of Advent, or not one note before Christmas Eve. The response that this inquiry received was amazing, with over 200 comments total, and 162 responses falling within five main camps. Surprisingly, 43% named a date I didn’t offer, such as December 1, October 1, and Remembrance Day, and another 7% refused all four and said never. The five camps are the Year-Rounders, the Early Birds, the Hinge-Keepers, the Waiters, and the Refusers. This was not an official poll, but a group full of people who had something to say, and I really appreciate every response.
The Table - The Five Camps
Here is how the five camps voted sorted by when your Christmases begin:
**YouGov asked 2,217 U.S. adults when it’s acceptable to start listening to Christmas music, and 5% said they didn’t know. I mapped the YouGov responses into these five camps.
For comparison, I’ve included the YouGov survey results conducted on November 21, 2019. The percentages between the YouGov survey and the 162 Yuleology responses are mostly similar, and there is a little more separation for the Waiters (difference of 6%), and the largest difference is for the Hinge-Keepers (difference of 10%).
Part of the differences in the table (especially the 10% variance for the Hinge-Keepers who start on Thanksgiving or just after) could be attributed to the audience for the YouGov survey which is U.S. only vs. the Yuleology audience which trends more international, with about 62% from the U.S., 13% from the UK, 7% from India, and 5% from Canada, and almost 2% from Australia. While the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday on the fourth Thursday of November acts as a strong musical hinge for the “one holiday at a time” group, other countries either do not celebrate Thanksgiving (such as the UK) or celebrate it earlier (such as Canada which celebrates the holiday on the second Monday of October).
The Year-Rounders
The Year-Rounders are those who never stopped listening to Christmas music, and 35 of you (22%) boldly confessed their year-long Christmas passion. A recurring motif within this group was about playing the music which makes you happy. A comment which received the most likes in this batch spoke about having a Christmas song as an alarm all year long. Several replies mentioned the positive effect of Christmas music on their mood, and one mentioned listening to mostly medieval Christmas music.
I must confess that I now fall into this camp as well. I would usually scatter a few Christmas favorites (such as “Sleigh Ride” by the Boston Pops Orchestra and “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” by Andy Williams) into my normal playlists throughout the year, and I’ve always studied potential Christmas choral scores in the summer in preparation for the upcoming season. However, since I’ve started Yuleology, I’ve been researching and listening to Christmas music every week for a future essay, note, recording, and/or video. Christmas music truly makes me happy, and I love the opportunity to share my passion with you.
The Early Birds
The Early Birds named a date before the U.S. Thanksgiving as the start of their Christmas music listening season, and there were 24 of you (15%) total. Almost half from this camp answered with either after Halloween or November 1st (one of the menu options), and several said after Remembrance Day. Among the other start dates mentioned included Michaelmas, the Canadian Thanksgiving, and mid-November. There were also a few comments about secretly listening to Christmas music before the rest of the family, in order to not get teased or mocked. iHeartMedia, which owns over 860 local radio stations across U.S. markets, begins to transition their stations to Christmas music in mid-November.
The Hinge-Keepers
The biggest camp is the Hinge-Keepers, with 59 of you (36%) who start to listen to Christmas music either on Thanksgiving Day (U.S.), or right after it. 17 cited Thanksgiving Day as their official start, and 42 started after it. Many from this group want to follow one holiday/season at a time (hence the hinge-keeping), with one month of Christmas music being enough for them. A few comments mentioned when Santa arrives at the end of the Thanksgiving Parade as their sign to switch on the Christmas music. The comment with the most likes from the entire post involved a compromise between a husband and wife, which settles on the day after Thanksgiving. In the U.S., this camp is bigger still, as nearly half of Americans pick this time period as well. I grew up in this camp, as our Christmas music started and our decorations went up right after Thanksgiving.
The Waiters
Our third-largest group is our Waiters, with 33 of you (20%) practicing your namesake for a later date than the Hinge-Keepers. 15 chose December 1st as their start date, with one mentioning a rule of no music or decorations for December holidays until December. Several others cited Advent as the start of their season, and one reply mentioning theirs is timed to the Army-Navy game weekend. Among the other dates given are the Winter Solstice, December 6th (which is St. Nicholas Day), waiting until after the December 6th École Polytechnique Montreal massacre anniversary, mid-December, and Christmas Eve.
I suspect some of our international readers live in this group, as a November 2021 YouGov poll of 2,008 Great Britain adults found that 65% of them believe Christmas music in public is only acceptable to begin from either the beginning of December, mid-December, or the week of Christmas.
The Refusers
The smallest group (which aligns with the November 2019 YouGov survey results cited above) are the Refusers, in which 11 of you (7%) said no to any Christmas music, anytime. Five comments explained their feelings with two words: retail work. One commenter referenced working seventeen retail Christmases and hearing the same forty songs continuously. A few houses in this group are Christmas-free zones, and one musician sings enough of it for other people and doesn’t want to hear it elsewhere.
Inside the Camps
Almost twenty of the respondents inside all of the camps were musicians, teachers, or choir members, and for some of them the season started in September, or even as early as May. I typically introduce Advent and Christmas music with my Chancel Choir in September, and my Bell Choir begins their Advent/Christmas rehearsals by the end of October or early November. Six of you keep two separate start dates: one for yourselves, and one with the family. One of these listens in the car all year long, but has a house start date of November 1st.
Where Christmas Ends
Although I asked when your Christmas begins, many respondents mentioned when their Christmas ends. 18 of you gave an end date for your Christmas music season, and a third of those said Epiphany (January 6th). Three more mentioned New Year’s Eve, one mentioned Christmas Day, and most of the other commenters gave a date in early to mid January. One reader extends their season until February, and in an upcoming essay, I’ll uncover the special religious feast day in early February which some people extend their Christmas season until.
From the Record
The complaint that the Christmas season is starting earlier each year is older than the radio. The December 12, 1883 edition of the Washington Evening Star noted that “The holiday season of trade seems to begin earlier every year.” This was a full hundred years before the term “Christmas creep” became popular in the mid-1980s to denote the ever-earlier start of the holiday season each year.
A major debate centering around the start of the Christmas season occurred in the United States in 1939 during the “Franksgiving” controversy. Abraham Lincoln had established a national day of thanks and praise on the last Thursday of November with his Thanksgiving Proclamation of 1863, and this tradition was kept into the 1930s. During the Great Depression, most retailers followed an unwritten rule to wait until after Thanksgiving to start their Christmas promotions. However, in 1939, there were five Thursdays in November and Thanksgiving was scheduled to be on the last day of the month (30th), and retailers were concerned about having fewer days for their lucrative Christmas season. Franklin D. Roosevelt, then in the middle of his second term as President, announced that Thanksgiving would be a week early on November 23rd, 1939. What seemed like a harmless date change resulted in thousands of angry letters sent to the White House in protest of the move, and almost half of the states decided to keep the original Thanksgiving date of November 30th in an act of protest against the President’s decision. Three states (Colorado, Mississippi, and Texas) decided to keep both Thanksgiving dates, and in 1941, Congress voted to have a unified Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November every year moving forward, which was signed into law on December 26, 1941.
Coming In December
I am so grateful for all of your replies to my posts, notes, videos, and essays, and I love learning more about each one of you. I will be posting another special essay in December about the responses I received for the question I posed back in September, about which Christmas song would be the first on your “Skip” list. The response to this simple question was overwhelming, and in total it received almost 1,000 responses. There will be a lot to unpack as we sort through the most skipped songs, the most skipped artists, which songs were defended, and the most surprising reasons behind pressing “Skip.”
Sources and Further Reading
The Battle for Christmas, by Stephen Nissenbaum. A cultural history of Christmas in America.
Christmas in America, by Penne L. Restad. A book from Oxford University Press about the Americanization of Christmas.
Christmas Unwrapped: Consumerism, Christ, and Culture, edited by Richard Horsley and James Tracy. A book which interprets Christmas in America as a growing secular religion.
Listen Along - Recommended Playlist
Listen to seasonal music for when you start your Christmas season. The selections begin with the “Thanksgiving Theme” from the Vince Guaraldi Trio and the Advent carol “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” by the Choir of King’s College. Some of the Christmas tunes and artists mentioned in the comments such as Nat King Cole, Slade, and Wizzard are included, followed by Auld Lang Syne by Guy Lombardo & His Royal Canadians for New Year’s Eve, and “We Three Kings” for Epiphany follows.
Below the line, for Evergreens: the image of the actual Washington Evening Star newspaper article from December 12, 1883, and one of the letters sent to FDR in protest of his 1939 Thanksgiving decision