This week’s blog post is by WDP co-host Matt Rocco, who lives in the Edgewater Glen neighborhood of Chicago with Professor Foster (his “Brown Mom” wife), and their daughter Viva, who will dress like “Frozen” and then prepare for Frosty.
Halloween is the thin orange line between autumn and insanity. If you’ve got a really good nose and you sniff the air right now, just behind the smells of pumpkin spice, popcorn balls, and the Bears’ inability to play football is the faint odor of motor oil and gingerbread. The Christmas Machine is firing up.
This Friday, once you’ve dropped the last fun size M&M packet into the last Elsa of Arendelle’s plastic jack-o-lantern, once the last Loyola or Northwestern student crawls back into their dorm in a sick-stained “Sexy Ebola Patient” costume, before you’ve even checked all the caramel apples for razor blades, the winter holiday industry is set to unleash yuletide hell.
Tired of Halloween yet? Between the proliferation in recent years of Halloween pop-up stores in every abandoned Borders and Blockbuster, to the inflation of audio-animatronic graveyard front yards (Naperville, go home, you’re drunk), to the invasion of increasingly disturbing adult Haunted Houses (Montgomery’s Asylum of Obscene Clown Attacks, we’re looking at you.), it’s enough to make you want to go back 30 years to when Halloween was ONE NIGHT of little kids in plastic Dukes of Hazzard smocks and the occasional teen spraying shaving cream on your car.
But that’s nothing compared to the red and green explosion of materialism, obligation, guilt, debt, and regret that’s set to start Nov. 1.
This week, your biggest worry is why you keep eating candy corn even though every year you re-discover how mind-blowingly awful it tastes. Next week you’ll be wandering bleary-eyed through a mall, your MasterCard so hot from swiping it burns an expiration date into your leg.
This week, your kid is complaining that their Minecraft costume isn’t blocky enough. Next week you’ll be wondering how you can fit your kids’ Christmas, your parents’ Christmas, your in-laws’ Christmas, your Office Christmas, your wife’s Office Christmas, your friends’ Christmas, and a ride on the Santa El train into one week’s time.
This week, you’re raking leaves off your plastic graveyard. Next week you’ll be calling AAA to tow your plowed under car.
So eat tiny Snickers, drink apple cider and be ghoulishly merry, for tomorrow we shall deck the halls. Mwah ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!!!! (Fa la la la la, la la la la.)
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