We’re going to take a one week break from Christmas in Pandemonium. To the maybe three people who read it, my apologies, but we’ll be back next week. Instead, I’m going to use this blog to rant about something I don’t like, namely, Halloween creep.

            The loyal readers of this blog, both of you, know that I am on the record with saying that Halloween is better than Christmas. I have a lot of reasons for this, but one of those reasons is that Halloween knows what its place is and isn’t trying to butt into the cultural space of other holidays. That appears to have been changing recently, as we are now in the middle of September, and people are already talking about “preparing for Halloween.” You see it in grocery store displays. Your kids’ day care starts redecorating. Cable channels start running movie marathons. It’s September 18.

            Hey, American Capitalists, I know trying to convince people to spend their hard-earned cash can be difficult, and Halloween is a thing people recognize and generally like. I understand wanting to exploit the holiday as much as possible for moolah, but don’t you run the risk of overexposure? As I’ve argued before, one of the reasons that Christmas is overrated is that it’s gotten to dominate three months of the year and overshadows other holidays. Thanksgiving is basically just a warm-up. The way things are going, Halloween could assimilate Labor Day at any moment, and you might even see people dressed as vampires in the sweltering August sun. Eventually, people will get tired of it, making Halloween less fun for everyone, and diluting your profiteering.

            Maybe we need more good holidays, not extending the hold over the calendar major holidays already have. We don’t need Halloween season to last three months. We to populate the other months with better holidays. For instance, now that we’ve added Juneteenth and still have July 4, maybe we should add VE Day (May 8) and VJ Day (Aug. 15). That way, between VE Day and Labor Day, we could just hang up red, white, and blue banners, leave them up, and shoot fireworks off every weekend. We’ll call it the patriotic months. Imagine the little flags made in China you could sell.

Next, make Oktoberfest an official holiday, so this Halloween creep bullshit gets nipped in the bud. Hey, if Italians get Columbus Day and Irish people get St. Patrick’s Day, why don’t the Germans get something? Then, we get an excuse to celebrate Cinco De Mayo.

Finally, we need to do something about January. New Years Day is just an excuse to get drunk, and it’s both too close to Christmas and at the beginning of the month. You’ve got Martin Luther King’s Day, but it’s tough to turn a holiday about a civil rights figure into a cynical cash grab. (Or is it?) The Emancipation Proclamation was signed on January 1, but we’d want to move the holiday celebrating it to sometime in the middle of the month or even towards the end to distance it from Christmas.

Anybody else got ideas for new holidays? Tell me about them in the comments.