Family Daze: Merry Hallow-thanks-mas!

I don’t want to alarm anybody, but apparently Christmas, bored with overshadowing Thanksgiving, is now taking over Halloween.

Yes, it’s true. I know this because yesterday, in the local discount store, I saw a mechanical Santa Claus ringing a bell next to a smoking cauldron. I walked past a herd of stuffed Rudolph mixed in with bags of green spider webs and flourescent skulls. And I stopped in my tracks when I came across a green, four-foot witch holding a broomstick and singing Silent Night. (OK, so I could be wrong about this last one, but you get my point.)

If this isn’t enough to cause you to pick up and move to another county, I don’t know what is.

Oh, it’s not like I don’t like Christmas. I do. But there’s something sneaky about a holiday that won’t stay in its allotted time slot. I mean, you don’t see Mother’s Day trying to take over Valentine’s Day. Or Father’s Day moving itself to, say, April. But not so with Christmas. Oh sure, you might THINK it’s an innocent sort of a holiday, but, trust me, as soon as you’re not looking it’s going to move itself to October, then September, and gradually work it’s way back to Easter before eventually taking over the world.

Paranoid? Maybe. But I can’t help worrying that Christmas is going to start coming earlier and earlier. There’s something disturbing about buying a fruitcake when it’s 90 degrees outside and you’re working on your summer tan.

Of course, we all know what’s really going on here. What’s really going on is that each year, retailers are starting the Christmas season earlier and earlier, hoping that we won’t notice. Naturally, this brings up all sorts of issues. The first being that you run the risk of looking up one day in mid-September and finding everything merged into one gigantic, three-month-long, holiday called Hallow-thanks-mas, where we dress up as reindeer, carve pumpkins into turkeys, give out candy canes, and make stuffing out of fruitcake and candy corn. Then we’ll all be sorry.

But the biggest problem is that it gives kids at least 40 extra days to make their Christmas list.

Every parent knows that any glint of red and green in the stores is the universal signal for kids, to whip out packages of permanent markers and reams of paper. Mind you, these are the very same kids who can’t find a pencil to do their homework with the rest of the year.

Sure, you can always hope they won’t notice, but trust me, they will.

Or you could take my friend Linda’s advice and try to fool them into thinking the season of gift-giving isn’t really here. That’s what I recently tried.

Hey, look at that fabulous Santa Halloween costume!" I said brightly. Too brightly.

Of course, I’d be naive to think that something this simple would work on my family, and it didn’t.

At last count my kids had about a gazillion things on their list. (For those of you without kids, gazillion is a real number meaning, "you will be totally broke and eating cat food by January.") Much like a John Tesh CD and the return of shoulder pads, there’s not much you can do about it.

But let me just say to the retailers of the world, despite your early timing and your sneaky ways your big plan isn’t going to work on me. No-sir-ree. This year, like every other year, I’m going to uphold the Farmer family tradition of waiting until the last possible minute then bursting into the store and wildly flinging Christmas gifts into my cart. So ha! ha!

Although I suppose buying just one little carton of Halloween eggnog couldn’t hurt.