 There are so many food puns to be thankful for. Turkey puns, pie puns? It's like a corny copia. I love the fall, the turning of the leaves, the crispness of the air, Halloween costumes, pumpkin soup- Oh, come on! No joke, I took these pictures the day after Halloween. Apparently, if you wanted to buy any decorations for Thanksgiving, you had approximately 30 seconds after midnight on October 31st to get them. The phenomenon is called Christmas creep, or more generally, holiday creep, and while some people don't mind Yuletide decorations in music and retail stores coming earlier and earlier every year, more than half of consumers think that there should be a hard cut off at Thanksgiving, and it's not really hard to understand why. After all, the whole point of having a special time of year is that it's special. When every store you walk into has plastic reindeer and white Christmas playing over the PA for two or three months, it starts to feel a little less like a winter wonderland and a little more like Walmart. However, most economists agree that with things as they are, Christmas creep probably isn't going anywhere, and if anything is going to get worse. One of the main metrics that businesses use to measure success is to compare profits to profits from the same period from the previous year. There is a measurable effect that Christmas decorations have on purchasing behavior, so if you want this year's numbers to look as good as last year's numbers, if you whipped out the tinsel early last year, you have to again. Some economists also suggest that retailers are trying to get a jump on each other. If the holiday season happens in their store first, then consumers are more likely to spend their holiday gift money there. But it's not just an evil corporate money-making scheme, it's also a defensive measure against the insane rush of purchasing that happens around the holidays. Trying to manage inventory and cash flow when you've got a trickle of customers for most of the year and an avalanche for a few weeks in December would make anyone want to try and bleed a little pressure from that system. I mean, they don't call it Black Friday because it's a ton of fun. So long as consumer behavior and business metrics don't change, Christmas creep is probably going to remain a sort of war of attrition between retailers, where there's no incentive to back down and a small incentive to try and outdo everyone else. That's actually the name for this scenario in game theory, a war of attrition, where several players compete for a resource of some value, like holiday gift money, while accumulating costs, like the gradual erosion of the holiday season by dragging it out. And it actually has some very interesting implications. For example, let's say that you set up an auction for a dollar bill, with the stipulation that the loser still has to pay their bid. Player 1 starts the bidding at 98 cents, and Player 2 bids 99 cents. If Player 1 just stops there, then they're going to be 98 cents in the hole. However, if they bid a dollar for the dollar and win, then they'll break even. So they bid a dollar for a dollar, and even exchange. If Player 2 just stops there, then they're going to be 99 cents in the hole. If they bid a dollar and one cent, then they'll only be one cent in the hole. So they bid a buck o' one, one cent more than the dollar is actually worth. That stepwise mechanism of competition theoretically continues to infinity. In actual experiments, two perfectly rational bidders will end up paying around $5 for that single dollar bill, taking massive losses so they don't have to suffer even greater losses. And that mechanism doesn't just apply to money, either. Any resource that can be competed for is subject to the same effect, and if you look around, there are no shortage of examples. Like boxes for board games have slowly been increasing in average size, not because the average size of the components has been increasing, but because the more space that the box can take up on the shelf, the more likely it is that someone will notice it and buy it. The average loudness of advertisements on television has slowly crept up over time, to the point that the FCC has begun regulating just how loudly your TV can shout at you about laundry detergent. Terms like awesome, amazing, or wonderful, words which used to be superlatives describing states of being absolutely overwhelmed by emotion, are being used increasingly more frequently to describe increasingly mundane things. It's all the same basic effect. Someone uses the term awesome to describe a hot dog, so if I want to describe the magnitude of the event of humanity parking a satellite on a comet, I've got to top that. So is this just an inevitable spiral of escalation? Are we doomed to see Christmas decorations go up in mid-January? Well, not necessarily. Game Theory does have some methods to exit the War of Attrition Game without losing, especially if you have some control over its structure and know what you're playing ahead of time. First, if you're a super-rational actor, that is, someone who knows what happens when everyone plays for their best interest, one winning move is not to play in the first place. Player one bids one cent, you know where this is going, so you say, good for you, go for it. In that vein, some stores in Canada have put their collective feet down, saying that they absolutely will not put out Christmas decorations until after November 11th, Canada's Remembrance Day honoring its veterans. Some U.S. companies like Nordstrom have also advertised a no Christmas decorations until Thanksgiving policy, just flat out refusing to participate in the race. Pretty cool. A second option suggested by Game Theory is to change the incentives of the game. If you're like the majority of consumers and you don't want companies clamoring for your holiday gift money before Thanksgiving, you can just not shop at those businesses that do, or at least wait until you think it's appropriate for them to be getting that cash. After all, the Internet can get you almost anything you want in less than a week, and you won't have to listen to the same five baby boomer Christmas songs on loop while you're waiting in line. Even if you're one of the people who doesn't mind seeing Christmas decorations bleed into October, it is making a lot of people pretty upset, and the spirits of Christmas past, present, and future just can't handle that many screeches at once. Also, Thanksgiving and Halloween are amazing holidays and deserve a little space unto themselves. We have one day a year where we can cosplay in public, and another where we can eat as richly and as much as we want to. Let's savor that, like warm homemade apple pie with homemade whipped cream. Maybe a scoop of ice cream. Hold on a second. Happy Thanksgiving to my American viewers. Happy belated Thanksgiving to my Canadian viewers. Don't forget to blah, blah, subscribe, blah, share, and don't stop thunking.