November 1st used to be my least favorite day of the year. It's painful, still, but in a different way than it used to be. It is both a funeral and a celebration of life. A day of reflection, and some kind of triumph, to see myself and the remaining Halloween decorations still standing. It's difficult, but a strange kind of difficult.
I'm coming to realize that the actual hardest day of the year for me, might in fact be the day after Thanksgiving.
I believe I have said this over the course of multiple years: Thanksgiving is the final breath of autumn. I held onto it in childhood, despite my dislike of it then, because the pumpkins and scarecrows, and sometimes, still, the ghosts and bats and spiders and whatever else, would often hold on through then. Autumn lingered, though grayer and more bitter, more brittle, but it was still there, through Thanksgiving Day.
The world has evolved in the strangest of ways...I have watched Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas compete with each other since November 1st morn. On one lawn, a skeleton stands tall, while Santa waves at him happily from across the street, brightly lit tree at his side. Next door to Santa, a turkey sits, almost dumbly, as if he doesn't even know why he's bothering. In some cases, the three holidays even exist within the same yard. It's truly bizarre, and it's become more and more difficult to find the remnants of Halloween, even on the day after, as time has gone on.
But I still search for them. They diminish, more and more, as November fades, but I go in search of them, regardless. And they do appear to me...The rotten pumpkins, the forgotten ghosts.
The problem with Thanksgiving, though, is that they are suddenly remembered. And with that remembrance, comes the realization that their time is up.
I actually witnessed, earlier today, someone setting their remaining pumpkins out by their trash. In all my years of being hyper-aware of Halloween decorations, particularly in the layman's off-season, this is not something I think I have actually ever seen happen, firsthand, before, and it felt like the ultimate portrait of Post-Halloween-Depression; the final flame of autumn being extinguished.
Later this afternoon, I went for a walk, on a route I had last been shortly before leaving for Sleepy Hollow at the end of October. This part of the neighborhood had been so amazingly alive before Halloween, and it made me feel like crumbling to see it laid so bare today. So few remnants remained. I found myself questioning if I had dreamed the entire thing.
Sometimes it really feels as though Halloween, at least in the way it feels for me, exists only in my own mind. It feels as though some sort of sleeping spell has befallen the world now, and I'm the only one who can remember that Halloween ever happened.
The rotten pumpkins, the lost souls of October 31st, still roaming as Thanksgiving lurched forward, were the only proof I had that Halloween ever happened in the first place.
Now even they are leaving. November fades into overpowering December, and I am left to wonder if I truly am the only one who remembers, or at the very least, the only one who feels like crying when they do.
It's a long road until the world will be a place I recognize once again. I am just a pumpkin, rotting away on a doorstep, unable to move forward or back in time.
Stay spooky, my friends.
Comments
Post a Comment