Party on, dudes

In Seattle, the air is cooler and the skies darker.  Summer is ending, but still lingers in the green leaves of the trees, leaves touched only in places by shades of yellow, depleted only rarely by falling from the trees.  October has arrived, gradually and gently.

Happy Halloween!

What, you exclaim?  Halloween is still another four weeks!. 

Ah, my child, like me you are of the old school.  When I was a kid, Halloween was a day, not a season.  It was foreshadowed a day or two before October 31 itself, when our mother brought home a pumpkin (yes, just one!) for us to hollow out and cut into a face.  And admittedly, there were two or three years when I attended a Halloween party, the weekend before Halloween, at my grandmother's country club, proudly swooping around in my Batman costume -- but if the party was early, it was simply to avoid keeping the young ones up late on a school night.

The night itself was observed by trick or treating, and a family fire in the fireplace in front of which we ate hot dogs and other junk food.  The trick or treating was for kids, of course.  By, say, 14 you would be embarrassed to go from door to door, unless you were assisting a younger sibling.

The idea of an adult attending an adult Halloween Party would have been preposterous -- like gathering for cocktails on swings at a play park.

And that was it.  When the last hot dog was eaten, the holiday was over.

Now, of course, Halloween is an entire season -- in my neighborhood, the first yard decorations began going up two weeks ago.  Thanksgiving is still a more prestigious holiday, perhaps -- a legal holiday, two days off of work or school.  But in the extent and intensity of its preparations, Halloween is now easily ahead of Thanksgiving, and is creeping up on Christmas.

In fact, Thanksgiving may be suffering "holiday exhaustion" from being squeezed at either end by the Halloween and Christmas extravaganzas.  How else explain the lamentable tendency for guests at Thanksgiving dinners to spring up, even before dessert, and rush downtown to get an early start on their Friday Eve Christmas shopping.  The Pilgrim Fathers would weep.

In effect, the Nation now celebrates a continuous orgy of holiday celebrations, from late September until the final whistle of the Super Bowl in January.  This leaves out Martin Luther King Day, but all that boring talk about civil rights is a downer -- and it's hard to think of appropriate house decorations.

So, as I began, Happy Halloween.  Happy Autumn Festival.  Let's party with increasing frenzy, as the days, week by week, grow shorter and darker.  And let's ignore thoughts of any disturbing metaphors.