This seems like a good time for a few words from Seneca (d. AD65) to his friend Lucilius:

It is the month of December, and yet the city is at this very moment in a sweat. Licence is given to the general merrymaking. Everything resounds with mighty preparations – as if the Saturnalia differed at all from the usual business day! So true is it that the difference is nil, that I regard as correct the remark of the man who said, “Once December was a month: now it is a year”.

Goodness knows what he would have thought if Roman shopkeepers had been selling tinsel and fairy lights in October.

Seneca’s ideas on how a good Stoic should respond to public merriment can be found over at Stoics.com