Holiday inflation

No, I'm not talking about monetary inflation.  I mean the length of the holiday season.  It just seems to keep getting longer and longer.

If you start with Halloween preparations, then the holiday season starts in October.  Then comes Thanksgiving.  Then Christmas.  And along the way in November and December, you have to get your Christmas shopping squared away.  Then we get New Year's Eve and the associated bowl games, but bowl season keeps getting extended, and now it goes into the third week of January, finally wrapping up on the 19th. 

It's basically three months of holiday stuff. 

This sort of thing happened in the Roman Empire, too.  They kept adding more and more state holidays, and it eventually got to the point where basically no work was getting done for half the year except by slaves, and even the slaves often got to enjoy the holidays in some circumstances.

Over the long term, this becomes a strategic matter and eventually an existential matter.  If your people are barely working, then other countries with more industrious people will economically surpass you in the global economy.  And if your country is blessed with natural resources, then those other countries will eventually turn their covetous eyes your way and wonder why they shouldn't just take the land away from the lazy bums who live there, move their own people in, and put the place to a more productive use.

I suppose this is just the natural cycle of societies.  "Weak men create hard times" and all that.  I just wish I didn't have to watch it slowly but inexorably happen here where I live.