When is the "appropriate" time to decorate for the holidays?

I joke and say I follow Disney's calendar for holiday decorations. Halloween starting in August and Christmas starting in early November.

I would personally say the best time to decorate for the holidays is the first week of the month that they are in. :D (with no overlapping, for me, it keeps the season alive for each one.)

Edited 17 hours ago17 hr by Xecronius

Depends on where you live too.

When I lived in the States, it used to be years ago that stores didn't put up Christmas decor until Thanksgiving. In fact the department store I worked at had a tradition where store employees could work the evening of Thanksgiving Day (back in the days when most stores were closed that day...) installing decorations, and they not only got paid for it, but also got to have Friday off. It was worth it working until 2-3 am to avoid Black Friday crowds.

When I was a kid my Dad was a firm believer of timely Christmas displays..which for him meant no sooner than the week before Christmas...and that was a compromise with us kids. We used to drive up into the mountains to cut our own tree. One year we brought home a gorgeous 12 foot Noble Fir. Unfortunately we only had 8 foot ceilings...

His solution was to cut off 2 feet from the bottom, and 2 feet from the middle, then nail the two halves back together...

Here in Brazil there's no Thanksgiving Day to kick off the holiday season like it used to up north, nor any wide-spread Halloween celebrations as a speed bump, so July usually marks the arrival of the Christmas Panettone's to the grocery stores (where some will remain until after the arrival of the Easter version...I have no idea what's in them but they do, in fact, remain fresh...). Malls are decorated by the end of September. The Christmas tree at the entrance to our condominium went up last week, same with the lights on our building and the trees in the park across the street. My Gringo mind-set doesn't allow me to put up the trees (we have two because I buy too many damn Disney ornaments, and the artificial trees here are fairly small...) until after Thanksgiving is held in the States.

I always cook a huge holiday meal one time a year for friends, a mix of Americans and Brazilians with American and Brazilian foods (turkey and ham and all the trimming along with rice and beans - because rice and beans are a requirement for EVERY meal). No candied carrots or sweet potatoes with marshmallows - mixing sweet and savory food in one meal is darn near sacrilege here!

Lot's of salads and veggies, but I'm the only one who eats sage stuffing, so I make it for myself, long with the can of cranberries I bring back in my suitcase from our annual trip to the States, along with a few other things we can't find here. I make cheese logs and dips. Even though it's mid-summer here, I still bake pumpkin pie from scratch, make cookies (all that makes excellent reasons to point out how I slaved away in a hot kitchen so someone else really should volunteer to do the dishes...which sadly never works...), and we have freshly made tropical fruit salad with a big scoop of French Vanilla ice cream a little later on. And while we don't drink ourselves, there's always Caipirinha's available.

we have traditionally put them up Thanksgiving weekend