With today being October 31, which is to say Halloween, we witness the unique retail ritual of store managers deciding when, precisely, to start shifting over the Halloween candy to make room for the Christmas candy.
To be clear, the Christmas candy showed up weeks ago, but now that we are at HallowChristmas, there is a new tension in the store air, as managers ponder exactly when the bat-festooned Snickers must make way for the mistletoe-festooned Snickers.
Speaking of, here is a Halloween cartoon for you. It doesn’t even have a cat!
I’m not superstitious–at least about numbers or dates–and it’s pretty weird when you think about how people can be spooked by a certain date falling on a particular day.
But people are pretty weird as a rule.
More importantly, Friday the 13th gives me the perfect excuse to post an image of a scary black cat!
Well, scary-ish. Okay1I still can’t decide whether to type OK or okay. Maybe I should do a poll on the internet., not really scary at all, but actually cute.
Check ALL THE OPTIONS. Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com
It’s that time of year when people are doing things because, for some reason, organizations have chosen to stuff these events into the last few months of the year.
Should I participate these things? Let’s have a look-see:
Halloween
I don’t really do Halloween, other than maybe enjoying some of the decorations people put up in their yards around the neighbourhood. That’s enough for me. That, and watching the Peanuts Halloween special. Also, Halloween is technically just one day, even if candy shows up on store shelves three months before October 31st, so it’s pretty easy to just say I’m not taking part. Maybe some alternate universe version of me dresses up as a vampire and goes out to costume parties to all hours of the night. I’m happy for that version of me, with his suave goatee and all, but it’s just not this universe’s version of me.
Inktober
I used Inktober a few years back to help rekindle my interest in drawing. It worked! I have not drawn much over the summer, for various reasons and thought about doing Inktober again (using my own rules, of course, because I’m a rebel). But today is October 10 and that means 10 of 31 prompts have already come and gone. Yes, I could just wave them off and start with #11 tomorrow, but it would bug me that I was missing a bunch, and I’d try to catch up, and maybe it wouldn’t go well? I don’t know. I think I’ll mull this for one more night before deciding.
National Novel Writing Month
This is coming up in November, as it always does.
I was thinking about whom the ideal participant in NaNoWriMo is and this is what I came up with:
New writers looking to establish a writing habit. To win, you need to write 50,000 words over 30 days, or about 1,667 word per day. It’s demanding and forces you to make time to write, and 30 days is enough time to build a habit.
More seasoned writers who have lost their mojo. For basically the same reason as new writers, a seasoned writer might find that NaNoWriMo gets the wheels turning again, allowing them to return to stalled projects or start fresh on something new and shiny.
Masochists who don’t mind spending 30 days writing what will likely be a garbage novel that will require a lot more than 30 days to fix.
I used to be #1, could make an argument for being an unpublished version of #21Techincally I got published in a Moose Lodge newsletter when I was 12 years old, and mostly feel like I was secretly #3 all along. I’m not sure if I want to invest the time writing to end up with something that isn’t very good. Writing under the pressure of NaNoWriMo certainly gets you lots of words, but I feel trying to complete a novel in that 30 days leads to a lot of shortcuts, sloppy writing and what you’re really doing is trading the satisfaction of completing a specific goal–a 50,000 word novel in 30 days–for the long slog of fixing that same novel and turning it into something readable, effort that may have been better spent just working on a novel without the pressure cooker 30-day deadline.
I mean, if you feel you need the deadline just to get something happening (#1 or #2), I think it’s valid, but you need to be prepared for a lot more work afterwards to turn that dashed-off novel into something good. Because why would you write a novel, otherwise?
Based on the above, I think the odds of me taking part in National Novel Writing Month 2023 are pretty darned slim.
In conclusion
I’ll probably just stick to my own list of tasks, which is chock-full of stuff that I shouldn’t let myself be distracted from, anyway.
The title really sums up the whole post. I went out for a brief walk this evening (it’s cool, but clear out) and was greeted by the non-stop crack and bang of firecrackers, fireworks and possibly surplus munitions being set off all around not just the local neighborhood, but even across the Fraser, where I could see fireworks bursting into the sky above Surrey.
It’s all kind of weird. How did fireworks become associated with Halloween, anyway? I realize that in 2021 I can trivially look up the answer, but I prefer to make up my own. So I’m just going to say it was Satan. Or maybe the Robot Devil (I’ve been watching a lot of Futurama).
This is pretty much the only thing that makes me look forward to November. It’s not that I hate fun, it’s just that, well…I hate fun. Specifically, noisy fun that makes my ears ring (even as I am typing this sentence, fireworks are still going off. It’s 11:22 p.m., go to bed, people!)
Today is Halloween, the second favorite holiday for candy purveyors. It is that special time of year when holidays collide. This means you will see Halloween and Christmas candy sharing space on store shelves. There is probably a decent chance that we’ll see some companies try to make their candy packaging work for both holidays. A witch wearing a Santa hat, perhaps.
As is often the case the weather is looking rather soggy and many of the little ghosts and ghouls out tonight will be carrying umbrellas, somewhat diminishing their terrifying aspect.
I will, as always, be at home, hiding away from everything and everyone, and will curse the late night fireworks because I hate fun in all its forms.
