This may seem a little premature for you, but it is really not, for you have not many days left in which to do your Christmas buying.

That is, buying days, a short enough period after all.

We're listening to an announcement that was published in the Quebec Daily Telegraph newspaper.

And as you can hear, it's trying to persuade readers to start

planning and shopping nice and early for the coming Christmas season. You can do away with that

mad scramble in crowded stores. The fighting to get near counters. The delivery delays. Yes, it's a

familiar refrain this time of year. It seems like before the leftovers from the Labor Day cookout are even used up, we're

hit with Christmas advertisements and hot new toys of the season and door buster deals.

And many among us grit their teeth and roll their eyes and complain about how Christmas

comes earlier and earlier every year.

But wait a second. Does it really come earlier every year? Could it really?

Let's play this out. How much earlier every year? A week? Let's be really conservative and say that it comes

less than a week earlier. How about four days? If that were true, and if the pattern remained

unbroken, then in just a little over 90 years

we'd have looped back on ourselves.

It would be perpetual Christmas, or at least a perpetual Christmas shopping season.

But here's the thing.

This trend of pushing for an early and extended Christmas shopping season has been unbroken

for over 90 years,

well over, as a matter of fact. And of course, we're not in perpetual Christmas.

This ad from the Quebec Daily Telegraph is from 1912, more than a century ago,

and it appeared in the paper a few days before Halloween.

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