{"id":32069,"date":"2025-08-30T02:57:19","date_gmt":"2025-08-30T02:57:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/32069\/"},"modified":"2025-08-30T02:57:19","modified_gmt":"2025-08-30T02:57:19","slug":"christmas-stores-in-august-utter-madness-or-do-people-really-want-to-start-their-festive-shopping-this-early","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/32069\/","title":{"rendered":"Christmas stores in August: Utter madness or do people really want to start their festive shopping this early?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"indo-ebe0ecc6_root indo-ebe0ecc6_paragraph indo-91174671_secondary indo-1d70522a_marginbottom4 indo-1d70522a_marginleft0 indo-1d70522a_marginright0 indo-1d70522a_margintop4\" style=\"color:var(--color-primary-80)\" data-testid=\"title-summary\">Shops are already selling decorations and festive treats, but is it consumerism gone out of control or a good way to lift the mood and help people get their present list sorted early? Arlene Harris discovers it\u2019s an emotive subject<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"Brown Thomas opened its Christmas shop on August 21. Photo: Brown Thomas\" src=\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/25762bd4-8696-4dc1-b8c7-5423d75ff5eb.jpg\" loading=\"eager\" width=\"100%\" data-testid=\"article-image\"  \/><\/p>\n<p class=\"indo-ebe0ecc6_root indo-ebe0ecc6_caption1 indo-300db776_none indo-91174671_secondary indo-66f0fec7_regular indo-1d70522a_marginbottom0 indo-1d70522a_marginleft0 indo-1d70522a_marginright0 indo-1d70522a_margintop3 indo-b48c4984_left\" style=\"color:var(--color-grey-60)\">Brown Thomas opened its Christmas shop on August 21. Photo: Brown Thomas<\/p>\n<p class=\"indo-ebe0ecc6_root indo-ebe0ecc6_paragraph indo-300db776_none indo-91174671_primary indo-1d70522a_marginbottom0 indo-1d70522a_margintop0 indo-b48c4984_inherit\" style=\"color:var(--color-primary-80)\">The kids may have gone back to school and the sun might have taken a bit of a sabbatical, but that doesn\u2019t mean that it\u2019s time to start decking the halls with boughs of holly. There was a time when the countdown to Christmas started tentatively after Halloween, but increasingly, year after year it seems to get earlier and earlier.<\/p>\n<p class=\"indo-ebe0ecc6_root indo-ebe0ecc6_paragraph indo-300db776_none indo-91174671_primary indo-1d70522a_marginbottom0 indo-1d70522a_margintop0 indo-b48c4984_inherit\" style=\"color:var(--color-primary-80)\">Brown Thomas opened its Christmas shop in stores nationwide on August 21, while we were all still enjoying glorious sunny days and the last vestiges of the summer holidays.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Shops are already selling decorations and festive treats, but is it consumerism gone out of control or a&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":32070,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[73],"tags":[79,16838,18,19,17],"class_list":{"0":"post-32069","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-christmas","10":"tag-eire","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32069","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32069"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32069\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32070"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32069"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32069"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32069"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}