Halloween already?

At the beginning of September, the bags of special snack-sized candies went on sale, despite there being two months still until the holiday.  Today at the market I saw a display of these lantern plants (physalis alkekengi) as another marker that it's drawing close, though still six weeks away.  Any day now all the homes are going to be decorated with ghosts, spider webs, witches and ghouls, and we'll have to look at them for the next month and a half.  And when Halloween is finally over, and the decorations have come down, it will be time to start decorating for Thanksgiving - after all, it will be only a month away.  And right after Thanksgiving, everyone will be putting up their massive displays for Christmas, and one radio station will be playing Christmas music  all the time even before Thanksgiving.  

Perhaps I'm just a curmudgeon, but all of this is really over-the-top from my point of view.  What's special about celebrating a holiday when you're celebrating all the time?  What makes each one distinctive?