What's the story with an early Christmas?

Halloween costumes haven't even been worn yet and the season to be jolly has already started. With each passing year, the pop group Wizzard's wish that "it could be Christmas every day" comes worryingly closer and Irish retailers are playing their part by pushing festive stock on shoppers as early as the first week of September. By the end of this week, Do They Know It's Christmas?and Stop the Cavalrywill be on maximum rotation in Irish shops, and cash registers will be singing loudly as another season of frenzied Christmas consumption gets underway.

In early October one Irish Timesreader was prompted to write to the editor expressing her dismay at the increasingly early arrival of Christmas. "We are already blatantly being made aware that Christmas is coming," Caroline Maslin wrote. "Nearly everyone you speak to is disgusted with this early arrival of the festive season, but I think it is about time that something was done about it," she continued.

Urging families to take a stand against the premature onslaught, she asked that people "take it down a gear. In a small way, we can each help our families, friends and children to get the joy of Christmas back again," she wrote.

We contacted Maslin last week and she told us she was prompted to write the letter when she noticed her local Dunnes Stores clearing a space for its Christmas stock in September.

She accepts that shops and shoppers share the blame and retailers are simply meeting customer demand. "The September day I saw the Christmas stock in Dunnes, I also saw three people in the queue ahead of me with wrapping paper, cards and Christmas candles in their baskets. It's just a vicious cycle."

She says her four-year-old daughter and her friends have all been talking about Santa for weeks. "I don't want people to think I am some 94-year-old Scrooge but it just has to stop. I feel so sorry for kids who have to wait through all this build-up and then it is over in five minutes."

THE COUNTRY'S FIRSTChristmas tree was sighted in Ballymena town square in the middle of October. "We're putting [the lights] on because people are coming in sooner, rather than the other way round. The people are here already doing Christmas shopping. They're not going to come because we turned the lights on, we're turning the lights on because they're here," said the town centre manager, Colin Neil.

It's not like this elsewhere. On the continent, the Christmas celebrations are considerably more muted and people don't know it's Christmas until it actually is Christmas. In Australia and South America nothing festive happens until the beginning of December at the earliest. And even in the US things are more low-key until after Thanksgiving has passed, although stores such as Walmart and Toys "R" Us have broken with tradition this year by launching furtive marketing campaigns in order to jump-start what they fear will be a poor buying season because of economic jitters and large-scale toy recalls.

And in other countries, when the parties begin they last a couple of days at most and don't turn into a two-week bender as happens in Ireland. All this partying comes at a price and an Irish Christmas costs at least twice the EU average and quite possibly even four or five times that when the food, booze and presents are all factored in.

Over Christmas last year we spent €4.25 billion on Christmas and in December around 750,000 people came into Dublin city centre every day to shop. According to the Small Firms Association, on Christmas Eve the spend was in excess of €23 million an hour and credit card spending during December was well in excess of €1 billion.

The deputy CEO of the Chambers of Commerce in Ireland, Conor Brennan, believes this rampant consumerism stems from our relatively recent poverty and having come "from being the paupers of Europe to amongst the wealthiest nations of the world in the last 10 or 15 years".

HE POINTS OUTthat, economically, "we have grown so quickly that the expectation is that we must spend more". He accepts that Christmas does seem to be starting earlier with each passing year but says that retailers are not entirely to blame.

"There are two elements to it: some retailers are certainly bringing forward the start of the season but consumers are demanding it. We all suffer a degree of time poverty." He says that Irish consumers are more organised now than they have ever been and don't want to leave things until the last minute, and on that score he is right on the money - only a crazy person or a masochistic claustrophobic would leave their present-buying to Christmas week when it is impossible to move in town centres and all but the most mangy Fur Real ponies have fled the toy shops.

"We also don't want to be saddled with enormous expense in a single week in December, so many people like to spread the costs out over a few months. If people see that there are Christmas bargains in the shops earlier than used to be the case and they can save themselves some money by buying early, then that is a good thing from a consumer perspective."

Irish retailers have to get much of their stock from China and often find themselves at the back of the global queue so have to get their shout in earlier each year to ensure that their shelves are stocked throughout the season. There is also, Brennan says, increased pressure on Irish retailers from online traders which, he believes, may also explain why the Christmas shopping season is forever "creeping forward".