Christmas must be over. Reason 1: Dead Christmas trees on the nature strip
Reason 2: Hot cross buns in the supermarket… just in time, only four three and a half months before Easter.
Speaking of the supermarket, it does seem like trolley retention rates are increasing since they started wanting a gold coin deposit… so much so that yesterday they were clogging up the entrance.
5 replies on “Christmas is over”
…and I thought the Valentine’s candy already in the stores here was silly…
I remember getting hooked on the mocha hot crossed buns. I swear, they put heroin in those things!
Christmas is not over until the Feast of the Epiphany on the 6th of January. What people seem to forget is that the four weeks leading up to Christmas Day is the season of Advent (at least, in my experience, in the Catholic Church). The season of Christmas actually starts on Christmas Day, the famed “12 Days of Christmas” run until the Epiphany. It is for that reason Christmas decorations are traditionally taken down on the 6th, and also why many Orthodox denominations celebrate Christmas on the 6th. Also, in my parents’ homeland of Italy, they tend to place greater focus on the Epiphany, as that is the Feast that celebrates the Three Wise Men’s visit of Christ in the manger.
As for hot crossed buns, you’d think that they’d wait until the start of Lent, Ash Wednesday ( this year a late March 9). It just cheapens the whole notion of Easter, after all, it is commemorating the death and resurrection of Christ, not a chocolate festival. Indeed, Lent goes all the way up until Easter Sunday, then the season of Easter begins, lasting until Pentecost Sunday, some 50 days later.
@Andrew, couldn’t agree more! Very sad to have to take the Christmas decorations down tomorrow, but no way I could bring myself to buy HCB until the week before Easter. In my family they were traditionally eaten only on Good Friday, but I am a bit softer than my Mum! But only a bit…
At the Greensborough Safeway,they abandoned the Gold coin system for trolleys after many protests from customers and now it’s just the old “help yourself”system
It seems many people were really annoyed…as I was once when I turned up without money and planned to shop with my credit card…but no coin ,then no trolley,so I went elsewhere.