'Tis the season?

I went to Big W (Walmart) today, and I experienced a moment of cognitive dissonance when I suddenly heard a Christmas jingle. I turned my head to see where it was coming from and my eyes landed on a shelf of jittery reindeer, Santas, and chickens (doing the chicken dance). In the aisle behind the shelf, there were boxes of Christmas lights and Christmas decorations, and I was so confused. I thought, why are there Christmas lights out now? It's way too early for that--it's summer! I was starting to get disgusted by the commercialization of Christmas, and then it occurred to me--it's mid-October. While mid-October is still early for Christmas merchandise, it's not as early as I thought it was. (By the way, Kendra, my housemate, just enlightened me as to the earliness of the Christmas frenzy--they don't celebrate Halloween in October or Thanksgiving in November, so all the frenzy is focused on Christmas). It's not summer here yet, but it's definitely getting hotter, and I'm losing my sense of the seasons and the calendar of the northern hemisphere. It was weird to think in early September that the academic year was just beginning in the U.S. when I was already well into my semsester, and now I'm heading into the last two weeks of the teaching period of my semester, and then into exam period in November. So in two weeks, I won't have to go to lectures or tutorials anymore (yay!), and I'll be studying for my four exams (boo). I'll be done November 22 and then it's summer vacation! Crazy.