The day is October 29, 2019. The place is a Publix grocery store.

The crime is eggnog.

There I was, walking along, looking for milk, when I saw the horrific crime against the very cosmos themselves. The seasonal drink of the Christmas spirit, the hallmark of the winter festivities, was standing in the grocery aisles.

Eggnog. In three flavors.

This travesty cannot be allowed to go unnoticed. It must be called out. It must be lambasted.

“Why?” you ask. “It’s just a drink,” you claim.

It’s true – the eggnog itself may not be the sin of sins. But what it represents is a horror beyond the imagination of all sane men. For you see, the eggnog itself is not just eggnog, but rather the creeping tendrils of a hideous beast that seeks to claim all the world in its eldritch grasp.

The eggnog is an advance scout for Christmas Creep.

Christmas Creep, in case you do not know, is the phenomenon of the “Christmas season” slipping the rightful bounds of the month of December and slowly marching onward, earlier and earlier through the calendar year. The whole affair is fueled not by love and cheer and goodwill toward men, but by greed – the capitalist greed of the rich, sitting upon their vast, capitalistic empires. These robber barons of the modern day saw the wealth honest men spent on the gifts for their loved ones, and they smiled.

They set about pushing ads and decorations for the Christmas season earlier and earlier. This made them more and more money, making them richer and richer, so they pushed Christmas earlier and earlier in the year.

Thanksgiving was the first to fall. It fought. Oh, how it fought. The turkey decorations, the pilgrim décor – it truly gave the fight its all. But with Black Friday right next door, the defeat was only a matter of time. Now Thanksgiving is gone, consumed by the gaping maw that was the Christmas season. It swallowed it and set forth to conquer more of the calendar.

The decorations showed up sooner and sooner, closer and closer to the start of November. The Creep was seemingly unstoppable.

Until it met Halloween.

The decorations. The costumes. The candy. Halloween fought back against the very notion of Christmas Creep. It ruled October, and no eldritch beasts from soulless corporate men would enter its domain.

So, Christmas Creep stalled. It raged, it shouted and it stalled. And all was good.

Until now.

We cannot allow this evil to continue. This monstrous abomination must not be allowed to take the Halloween month. We must fight back! We must not allow it! Christmas Creep is a greed-fueled perversion of a simple and heartwarming day, and the whole mess should never have been allowed to come to pass.

But come to pass it has. Christmas is corrupted, corrupted by the greed of men. You could say the same of all holidays, but Christmas is the one most corrupted. We must not let it take Halloween. We must not let the rich win.

We must not let them sell eggnog before Nov. 1!