There are many reasons to love Halloween. Eating our body weight in bad candy, scaring our friends with our favorite horror movies, the chance to wear outfits that we would never be brave enough to wear otherwise. We can all agree that there are a lot of benefits to this particular holiday. However, there is one further reason why we should all love Halloween with our whole hearts:
It stops Christmas from taking over our entire lives.
Corporate Christmas can be likened to when you spill glitter on a carpet. It gets everywhere and months later you’re finding it inside your shampoo bottle. How did it get there? Who knows. (Honestly how does glitter do that? It should not be possible.) All Christmas does is, spread like a weed backwards into the year from the 25th.
The rest of the month of December fell first with the invention of chocolate advent calendars and the 25 Days of Christmas TV special. (That might just be a US thing, but it slapped.) I can cede, though, that Christmas taking over December is fine. It gets you in the Christmas spirit to see all of the decorations and eat all of the good chocolate and wear comfy sweaters. And the post-Christmas December days where you eat all of the leftovers in increasingly creative sandwich combinations is one of the greatest parts of the year.
I do have to say, though, that Christmas spirit in November is toeing the line. November is that in between month where if you’re American, you spend one day of it eating a massive amount of food at a table with your extended family, and the rest of the month leading up to Thanksgiving with apprehension about seeing your entire extended family. (Your mom really needs to stop inviting that one uncle.) In my humble opinion, November should be used as a month to take a much-needed break between two holidays. Getting out the Christmas decorations on November 1st is a crime. (Also, November is still autumn, and Christmas is not an autumn holiday, so get the fake snow out of here.)
But the decorations are put out on November 1st and not any earlier because of our hero: Halloween. Halloween is a noble warrior, standing on October 31st and blocking the entire month of October from the weed that is corporate Christmas. Halloween has even taken over the early morning hours of November 1st, pushing Christmas back into the afternoon when university students have finally crawled out of bed and taken painkillers for their hangovers. Up to this point, Halloween has been the unsung hero of the year, stopping us from celebrating Christmas year-round.
The goth kids hold the line.