It’s a holly jolly… Halloween

This has been an odd week.

It began with incredible hot temperatures on Sunday, reaching 33 Degrees Celsius.  Monday and Tuesday were a bit cooler, and Wednesday changed completely with a morning temperature of -4 Celsius.  I actually had to scrape my windshield.  Environment Canada is calling for temperatures to warm up by the weekend, and we’ve even been told that we should be in for what is often refered to as an Indian Summer.

Odder still was what greeted me this morning while on my rounds to drop off the newspaper at the post office and local retail outlets.  At the Co-op Gas Bar, my first stop to drop off at retail locations, I had to stop at the doorway because something very strange was looking back at me.  It was one of those window stickers, you know the type.  You plaster it on for some holiday celebrations like Christmas or Easter.  But this wasn’t near as cheery as a jolly old elf or a cute bunny with a basket of treats.

This was the grim reaper.

I had to think about this for a moment, and then it finally hit me.  Yes, we’re half way through September, and autumn isn’t far behind.  Which means neither is Halloween.  One other thought struck me, that it’s too early for that.  However, that was quickly pushed to the side when I remembered seeing the Sears Christmas Catalog, delivered to mail in the last week of August.  If we can start planning Christmas giving that early, I guess we can damn well start thinking up ideas for ghosts, goblins and other things that go bump in the night.

Why not, really.  We think about Christmas gift giving almost six months before Christmas Day, why can’t we spend at least a month and a half thinking about Halloween.  Kids, and some adults, get dressed up and go trick or treating.  We seem to look up more information about haunted locations.  We tell ghost stories to each other.  We decorate our homes with jack’o’lanterns.  I know a few people that deck out their front yard to look like a spooky cemetery, complete with ghosts floating about (don’t worry, they aren’t real).  I see no reason why we can’t celebrate a holiday, or a festivity when we want to (minus the taking off time from work or school, that is).  We often come up against this idea that we can’t celebrate something unless it’s near or on the date that it’s worth celebrating.  But why?  Why can’t we have our own Christmas celebration in the middle of July?  Or Halloween in May?  There really isn’t a reason other than “well, that’s not the date for it”.

Speaking of holidays and celebrations, we are only four short days away from International Talk Like A Pirate Day, falls on a Monday this year, so I’ll try to drive my coworkers nuts.

Until next time…

…keep ’em flyin’!