November is a midpoint between Halloween and the winter holidays. For some people, that means it is time to decorate.  

Freshman Olivia Jackovino adores the winter holidays.

She said: “I celebrate Christmas at the beginning of the school year.”

She gets into the Christmas spirit in August by listening to holiday music, but she reserves the movies for after Thanksgiving. 

Mrs. Suske, Athletic secretary, agreed with this point of view: “when you feel like doing it, you start it.”

When it comes to decorating for Christmas, Suske said: “I put a few things out for Thanksgiving, not many. I usually try to wait until Thanksgiving comes, and then the day after I start.” 

Someone else with very strong opinions is Ms. DiGeronimo, science teacher. She decorates for Halloween, but not a lot, as her focus  is more on the winter holidays.

DiGeronimo said: “I think [Christmas] gets more decoration than Halloween.”

At home, her decorations are inside and outside, and she sets them up a week before Thanksgiving. 

“People come to your house on Thanksgiving, and people also come to your house on Christmas,” she said, “and if you’re going to put in all that effort decorating for winter holidays, I think you should get two uses out of it. That’s strategic. People come over during Thanksgiving and we enjoy early holiday decorations and then we get it twice.”

However, she doesn’t necessarily get into the Christmas spirit completely before Thanksgiving. 

“My concern is you want to be maximally enjoying the holidays during the holidays. We need to have some build up but if we start building up too soon, we might already be sick of it by the time we hit the holidays,” DiGeronimo said. “With that strategy in mind, I think that Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa music for me starts the day after Thanksgiving, and that would also start movie watching and scented candle lighting.”

Other people wait even longer before they decorate and get festive. Mrs. Nagle, media center specialist, starts the first weekend in December. She believes that before Thanksgiving, it’s too early to be listening to holiday music, and that the same applies for holiday movie watching. 

She said: “I like to wait till after Thanksgiving because I’m just not in the Christmas spirit yet until after that holiday. I think Thanksgiving is an important holiday for different reasons and I think it gets overshadowed.”

Mr. Barclay, P.E. and health teacher, agrees with her belief that before Thanksgiving, it’s too early for festivities. 

He said: ‘I think after that sort of Thanksgiving break, it’s a good time to switch your attention. And it’s still quite early, but it’s good to get in the spirit of things and just feel happy about it all.”

Nagle and Barclay don’t go all out. However, Nagle used to decorate more when her children were young, just as Barclay currently does for his 1 and 4 year old children. 

Nagle said: “I decorate for Christmas mostly inside the house. Maybe a wreath outside and a few lights. But nothing too big.”

“It’s more about them compared to when it was just myself, so we do a lot more decorations than we ever did before,” Barclay said. “We don’t go all out. We just have a Christmas tree up in the house and we decorate inside the house.”

Not everyone gets excited to decorate for the winter holiday.  Some prefer decorating for Halloween. History teacher Mr. Arnold and science teacher Ms. Fintz both focus more on their Halloween spirit.

Mr. Arnold is “pretty extensive” when it comes to Halloween. This year, he set up the “Cirque de Squelettes,” or Skeleton Circus, and he had a total of twelve skeletons around his yard. 

He said: “I had a skeleton as a magician sawing another skeleton in half. I had a skeleton juggling, a skeleton like a knife thrower. And I had one that was like a lion tamer with a skeleton dog jumping through a flaming loop. And  then I had skeletons on the roof that were watching it with popcorn.”

Ms. Fintz decorates her classroom with pumpkins, the occasional cobweb, and window decals. 

As for the transition to other holidays, Arnold said: “I try to do one holiday at a time. I try not to start doing too many Christmas decorations before Thanksgiving is over. I think it’s always weird when you know in August there’s Halloween candy at the grocery store. It seems too early. I like to kind of do one. I don’t like to get ahead of the next holiday. I feel like even now, in the beginning of November, it’s maybe a little early for a white Christmas kind of music.”

Ms. Fintz has strict rules for holiday festivities.

She said: “It’s December 1st for me. When my students try to convince me to start playing holiday music as soon as Thanksgiving is over, I refuse.”