Et quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

It’s probably simple nostalgia, but I recall Christmas being quite distinct and separate from other holidays.

There was a Halloween sugar overdose in late October.  A full month later came the unending amounts of turkey during Thanksgiving.  Then was a 30-day mad dash to put lights on the house and presents under the tree for Christmas.

Somewhere along the line, my perceptions improved.  Or the adeptness of soulless marketing shills.  Either way, I noticed that increasingly Christmas would “begin” immediately after Thanksgiving, as every shop in town immediately through up their decorations the very day after Thanksgiving as if to psychologically induce passers-by to empty their wallets for Christmas beginning immediately.

Later in life, I witnessed a change that was definitely new.  Some brazen store marketers would cross the line and beging putting up Christmas decorations a week or so before Thanksgiving, as a way of planting the seeds for the big After-Thanksgiving-Day Sale… which later became known as Black Friday (while a financial etymology, it nonetheless suggests the death of Xmas joy at the hands of blindingly overcommercialized saleshouting).

Last October, in Houston, Texas, I shook my head in disbelief as store after store rolled out the Christmas lights and other Santa-oriented decorations.  Before Thanksgiving.  Before Halloween. Yes, apparently, folks should be buying crap made in China for a full 3 months these days, just to keep up with the nonexistant Joneses of our TV-driven imagination.

But here in Romania, it’s the opposite situation.

Christmas is unable to be disturbed by Halloween or Thanksgiving, since they do not exist here.  And the merchants are only still at the beginning stages of overhyping the buying public into a comatose state of consumerism.

And yet, change creeps in.  Only, it is from the other direction, my friends.  Witness the encroachment found at a local grocery store in cartierul meu.

Uite.

It seems some Romanians cannot help but continue to embarrass themselves when marketing on the international stage.

They cling to the preposterous notion that Americans and other anglos are somehow captivated by a fictious character from 19th century Irish literature, namely Dracula.

While it may be fascinating for depressed 13 year old teenie boppers, I can assure you the rest of us don’t care at all.  Attempts to solicit commerce from adults by associating Romania with vampirism will be a sad failure netting a handful of bozos.

And yet it continues.

In the United States, the typical wine buyer has never heard of Romanian wine.   The few who have encountered it generally did so during the Halloween season at retailers promoting thematic oddities, such as a cheap Dracula wine and a subpar line of Vampire wines (whose ridiculously shallow owner eventually abandoned Romanian grapes altogether, to further fatten his purse).

Extending the farce, one can purchase from wine distributor Dracula Wines (a company so successful they apparently feel the need to run Google text ads on their website to make an extra nickel).

Romanian wine is, in effect, a joke to Americans.  Nice job, people.

Amazingly, it gets worse.

In Houston, I made a nuisance of myself by asking every grocer or liquor store I strolled into whether they carried Romanian wine or could special order some Palinca.  Nearly all were dumbfounded.  Romania makes wine?  What is pah-lean-kah?

However, at a Spec’s store in November, a chipper employee promptly responded in the affirmative and directed me to this tragic deposit of unsold “Halloween wine” gimmickery.