A Drunkass Christmas

Now that Halloween’s over and all the candy wrappers have been swept up, it’s time to tackle the next big holiday:

Christmas.

At some point, Thanksgiving, the traditional gateway to the holidays, was tossed overboard for Halloween as the starting gun for the annual gift-giving marathon.

It keeps creeping up incrementally somehow, as people already accustomed to instant gratification chomp at the bit for holly and mistletoe.

We’ve got a station here in Philadelphia that, honest to god, starts playing Christmas music 24 hours a day the weekend after Halloween. It’s never too early to begin putting Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer into heavy rotation, is it? Which is bad news for your humble narrator, who will have to suffer the joy of the season for the next 60 days thanks to the co-worker that dwells on the other side of his partition.

It’s sort of like a blob making its way up the calendar and gobbling up whatever other holidays stand in its way. Maybe we should just stand aside and stop fighting it. Throw out all the holidays and let it be Christmas all year round.

After all, this Halloween was really nothing to write home about. Although we did observe an interesting phenomenon this year.

Many of the kids who worked the houses on the other side of the street would turn around, take a look at ours, and head in the opposite direction. I can only assume that the amount of overgrowth and wild foliage our home now boasts actually does scare people.

Which sort of means it’s Halloween all year round at our place. The only thing missing is Gomez Addams sharpening the points on the fence.

However, everybody’s on a different wavelength. For instance, Mr. and Mrs. Drunkass, the couple who have taken up residence behind us and who always signal the end of the weekend with the tinkling sound of cases of glass empties making their way into the recycling, actually put up some Christmas lights before Halloween even arrived.

A good few weeks before the end of October, a string of red and a string of green lights suddenly appeared on their front patio. Were they afraid they’d forget to do it by the time December rolled around? Are they holiday enthusiasts? Did they feel the need to somehow fight back against the powerful Halloween vibe given off by our gothic manse?

Whatever the reason, they’re up there, twinkling away as if St. Nick were already on the radar.

Stranger still, all of this premature Christmas activity has been accompanied by some unseasonably warm weather. Yesterday it was 72 degrees here. You could drive around with the top down listening to Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer, for god’s sake.

Not to mention the fact that we just turned the clocks back. Now my external clocks are as hopelessly confused as my internal one.

Adrift in this timeless sea without a compass, I’ve been struggling to find true north.

The only thing I can count on is that waterfall of glass every Sunday. When I hear it, I know another week has gone by and I scrawl another line on the wall of my cell.

God help us all if they ever go on the wagon. The world will teeter on its axis and gravity will fail, as their twinkling lights point the way towards salvation.