Happy spooky season, everyone! Get those jack-o’-lanterns out, because Halloween is just around the corner!
Just kidding, no, it’s not.
It’s August, for God’s sake. Every day, I wake up to 90F weather – my skin moist with sweat and my eyelids stuck together. I can’t drink coffee on my porch without being consumed by an army of voracious mosquitoes that seem to find my blood to be the most delicious of all.
And it’s not just Los Angeles that’s withering under a summer of discontent. The east coast heatwaves are piling up, sending millions of young people to the absolute last place they want to be: an air-conditioned movie theater. But you want to tell me it’s fine to be putting out Halloween decorations? If I don’t store my giant bag of fun-size Twix in a standup freezer, the whole damn thing will melt into chocolate soup. (Don’t even get me started on recent claims you should eat soup when it’s hot outside. It’d rather slurp up my own sweat from a bowl.)
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Why am I fuming about this? Even though I love Halloween, I’m mad because our glorious big-box overlords have declared, via careful inventory selection, that Halloween season has begun. In August. I find all of that unacceptable. It feels like a violation of the natural order, a realignment of one of the few glorious constants left in the world. I yearn to go back to the tidy order of holidays, where no two ever cross paths. At most, Halloween celebrations should start in late September. Not a month after Independence Day. I fear those days are done, that our world has irrevocably changed and I need to start getting ready to give in to the new normal.
I first became aware of Halloween’s creep into the summer during a recent sundries run at Target. There are costumes, life-size skeletons, treats and various decorations on offer in-store. I’ve seen massive candy bags positioned to move at CVS. There’s even a smattering of greeting cards, which I find doubly frustrating, as I’ve never in my life considered buying someone a card for Halloween, a holiday that most adults spend binge drinking or squeezing into provocative outfits. What does a Halloween greeting card even say? “I Boo-lieve You Should Get an Uber Home”? “Have a Spooktacular One-Night Stand With Your Marginally Attractive Co-Worker”?
On that Target outing, my friend Halle (an admitted Halloween pervert) bought a miniature cauldron from the growing, metastasizing spooky section. I asked what she expected to do with such a trivial piece of merchandise. “Maybe I can put my keys or some change in here.” For two months? Then what? Do you say Back to the closet with youand wait another nine months before getting your coin cauldron out again?
I know there are people with boxes and boxes of festive decorations who swap them out season after season. Christmas ends, but Easter is just around the corner. Once that’s done, you chuck the bunny rabbits and start bedazzling your home with American flags to prep for the Fourth of July. Now I’m seeing the insidious truth: we aren’t far off from that Fourth-to-Halloween corridor shrinking even further. I see a world in which witches, demons and vampires slowly start bleeding into our patriotic revelries. It’ll get to the point where some of us might start thinking Frankenstein’s monster fought at the battle of Yorktown.
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One day, we’ll all just celebrate whichever holidays we want, whenever we feel like it. As the climate crisis renders the idea of distinct seasons and unique weather conditions a relic of a bygone era, why wouldn’t we just all live our own little celebratory truths? Even if my local store isn’t carrying Halloween decorations, I could feasibly buy them year-round on Amazon – my mailbox jammed up with boxes of plastic fangs, fake blood and green grease paint. If it never gets cold again, then Halloween can be whenever. Though I suppose the lifestyle I’m describing already has a name and it’s “being goth”.
It could be that our society is naturally evolving to be unbound by passé limitations such as “calendars” and “nature”. Instead of using holidays to mark the phases of the harvest or cycles of the moon (boring), they can be dictated by big data (chill and modern). Surely retailers around the country have statistics that point to consumers having a hankering for Halloween by August. Otherwise, why would Target be hawking rubber bats or decorative ghosts right now? We’re giving ourselves over to analytics in almost every other sector of our lives. Why not holidays?
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If the data says we want Halloween in the heat, then data shall be respected and worshipped. Who am I to argue with hard numbers? If the sun’s always shining, the grass is consistently brown and the acrid bite of wildfire smoke is clogging our lungs, the average human being might not be able to differentiate between the phases of our natural world. The only way for me to not continue to rage against this phenomenon is to surrender to capitalism completely. Instead of putting my finger out and seeing which way the wind blows, I just have to pop into Target to know what season it is.
The cognitive dissonance I might feel carrying my friend’s cauldron to my car in August is something my son might never feel. Time passes under the pall of climate control and fluorescent lighting. Our lives are measured by the movement of currency undulating and cresting like waves in the ocean. As this existentially crippling revelation washes over me, I take comfort in one thing:
Soon, sooner than you think, it will be pumpkin spice season.
