Christmas arrived at a drive-thru outside Little Rock on Monday, two days before Halloween, by truck, and it is a slush.

Sonic introduced the Santa Slush Float — a Christmas-shaped ice-and-soda event — with app early access beginning October 26 and a full launch on November 2, which places the drink’s national debut three days after the country finishes pretending to be a vampire. The accompanying menu item, a smoked Gouda and bacon smasher, suggests nobody at Sonic is interested in easing the transition.

“I want to be clear that we tested it through the fall,” said Devin Marsh, a regional menu coordinator, using the tone of a man who has tested it through the fall. “People wanted it. People always want it by November. We just stopped pretending November was the wall.”

That wall has, in fact, been missing for some years. The Halloween candy corns are already discounted in eleven states. Krispy Kreme ran a cartoon Tasmanian devil donut last week. Paper companies have been printing holiday envelopes since the summer, in bulk, like preppers. The only thing standing between October and December used to be the twelfth, and the twelfth has been revealed as a rumor.

The customers at the window had the range you’d expect.

A mother of four in a minivan said the float appeared exactly when she needed it, which was before the school plays, before the light bill, before her youngest asked why the mall Santa was in a hardware store. “By December I’m not a person,” she said. “This is me getting ahead.”

A fourteen-year-old in a costume that was mostly a bedsheet said he had tried the float at 4:12 p.m. and found it “aggressively Christmas,” and said he would return. Asked what he meant by aggressively, he said: “It’s December in a cup. In October. They’re not even hiding it. They’re flexing.”

An elementary school lunch worker, reached during her break, offered the day’s most quoted line: “We do pizza Friday. They do Santa Monday. Somebody call somebody.” Nobody called anybody. Lunch work does not lend itself to escalation.

The scientific community, when cornered, described the phenomenon as seasonal displacement and said it was harmless, mostly. A retail psychologist who has studied holiday product placement since the administration before last explained that stores learned decades ago the same lesson airlines learned with seats: the calendar is inventory, and unsold calendar is lost money. She added, unprompted, that she had seen her own office’s tree go up in September and had not reported it.

At the Little Rock window as the sun went down, an employee was fitting the second Santa hat onto the second slush machine. The leaves were still orange. The thermometer read seventy-one degrees. A kid in the back seat of a pickup had the float through the window and the cup was sweating in the warm dark, and the employee, watching him go, said what any seasoned observer of the seasons would say.

“Give it Tuesday,” he said. “It’ll feel like it’s always been here.”