Hello everyone! Thank you once again for making the West Virginia Book Festival a success for me! I really appreciate everyone buying Christmas in Pandemonium, regardless of when, how, or why!

You know what I did not appreciate: Halloween this year, which was like a horror movie with three hours of buildup only to end with the villain being some kind of cosmic spider that can only be defeated through magic rocks. Thank you, Stephen King.

As you all remember, (yes, there are enough of you to use “all” rather than “both,” at least now) I have a thing against celebrating holidays two months early. It’s semi-coercive, obviously commercialized, and crowding out the other holidays. Well, people started celebrating Halloween in early September this year, something I have complained about, and the results were predictable: Halloween petered out before the actual date.

When I was picking my kid up from Daycare, I could see the Halloween inflatables they had starting to deflate a full week before October 31. We were taking down Halloween decorations before Halloween. Then, there were various Trunk or Treat activities for two weeks before All Hallows’ Eve. Lots of fun for kids, but what it leads to is this idea that Trick or Treat doesn’t have to happen on Halloween night. Charleston, WV, where I live, even “moved” Trick or Treat to October 30, before moving it back to the real Halloween due to weather. Everyone’s first complaint was “That’s a Friday! What about High School Football?!” Needless to say, when actual Halloween came around, the level of festivities was greatly reduced from last year, probably due to our culture having demoted the actual day in importance to such a degree that most couldn’t be bothered to come out.

May I do a side note here: where does the Charleston city council get off telling people when to Trick or Treat? Trick or Treating is a Halloween ritual, and Halloween is on October 31 because All Saints’ Day is November 1. It’s essentially a religious holiday, though we don’t think of it that way. If anyone could change when Halloween is, it would be the Pope, and I’m not sure even he could do it. If he did, I think a lot of Chicago school kids would give him strange looks the next time he went to a White Sox game.

Finally, Hollywood has fallen for this as well. The Conjuring 4, supposed blockbuster for this Halloween season, came out on September 5. By the time Halloween rolled around, you could get it on streaming. There’s no reason to go to the theater anymore. Last night, I put the kids to bed and put on the Black Cat, an old Universal film from 1934. It’s an underappreciated classic, but I fell asleep halfway through. That’s this Halloween in a nutshell.

We don’t need longer holidays. We need more holidays celebrated better. Let’s make Oktoberfest a thing. Give everyone Valentine’s Day and St. Patrick’s off. By the way, if we’re open to adopting Saints days and other holy days, bring back Michaelmas! If it was good enough to make it into Shakespeare, it ought to be good enough for a bank holiday.