I asked my mom once what Christmas was like when she was a kid. My mom was born in 1915 on a farm in Kentucky—she remembered when cars first came to town. She vaguely remembered the Spanish Influenza epidemic of 1918. (Her father didn’t get sick and he kept the family alive on vegetable soup.) Christmas when she was growing up? “We got an orange in our stockings. And some chocolates.”

That was it? I couldn’t imagine Christmas without presents. But she said that Christmas wasn’t like that, then. When I was a kid, Christmas was already about toys. And Christmas specials. The Grinch. Merry Christmas Charley Brown. The day after Thanksgiving, Santa arrived at the local strip mall. But it wasn’t the big deal then it is now. Christmas didn’t start the day after Halloween. And Halloween wasn’t that big a deal. I made my own costume (without help.) Most people didn’t decorate. There weren’t Halloween parties.

Holiday Inflation. It’s weird. It’s all tied to consumerism and guilt. You decide to spend the same amount on everybody in the family, and your score on this great cashmere sweater at TJ Max for your sister that everybody is going to think is way more expensive than it really it. So then you have to buy more stuff for everyone else. And then you have to get something more for your sister because really, you didn’t spend that much on her and she only has one thing…

Or your friend—a good friend but not a gift exchange friend, more like the friend at work who probably knows as much about you as anyone in the world but part of what makes the friendship work is that you see each other at the job—gives you an unexpected gift. And you have to run out and get her a gift.

Or you can’t figure out just what to get your guy. So you buy him something that isn’t really great, and then another thing because the first one wasn’t really great and it’s not really great either, until you end up with a bunch of stuff none of it really great.

Christmas is getting insane.

But it doesn’t explain Halloween. My theory is that Halloween is all about not wanting to give up childhood. We’ve made a freaking shrine out of childhood. Childhood is magic. Childhood is the best years of your life. So as adults, we want that carefree joyous experience of childhood, only a little sexier. So we have Halloween parties where people where costumes that border on fetish gear.

I don’t know what other people’s childhoods were like, but mine was not the best times of my life. When I was a kid, other people were in control of me. School was boring. I had read everything in the reader by the end of the first week. History was about dates. Math was repetition. People told me when to get up, when to eat, what to eat, when to go to bed. When I was a kid, other than that blissful period of the day when I got off the bus and got to play, there wasn’t a whole lot of choice in the world. Sure, when I grew up, working at a job was boring and the hours were longer than they were at school but at least they paid me at work and no one told me that work was for my own good. I didn’t like being a child. When I was a child I wanted to be an adult. I don’t want to go back to being a child now.

But you know what Halloween is becoming? When I was a kid, Halloween was the one night when no one told me that I had had enough and stop eating candy. Of course, when I was a kid, we went out without parents in small kid gangs of friends. We wore clothes that made us unrecognizable to the neighbors. We were out after dark. It was a little night of anarchy. I think that’s what people want when they want to celebrate anarchy. I think we want to put on costumes and misbehave. There’s a long tradition of that. Mardi Gras is all about the night that the beggar is crowned king and people misbehave.

We’re becoming something interesting. Like those cultures where if you admire something the owner is compelled to give it to you. We’re becoming a culture that is all about seasons of holiday. Vast, orgiastic, bankrupting holidays of food and gifts. Our seasons are going to be Halloween, Thanksgiving/Hanukkah/Christmas, Valentines Day, Easter, Summer Vacation and Back to School and they are all going to involve expensive rituals of travel and gifting and special foods. Candy and hearts and flowers on Valentines Day. The weird candies of Easter—I mean, what are Peeps, really? We are going to spend enormous amounts of time preparing for or recovering from something.

In the abstract, I like the idea of belonging to this decadent technological society that expends enormous amounts of energy on ritual, party and celebration. It’s rather like dueling, or wearing veils and elaborate costumes. It’s very romantic. But in the actual fact I find all that shopping and worrying kind of tedious. Not to mention, given the state of the planet, immoral. And once you’re middle-aged, decadence is just exhausting. So I’m not going to Christmas shop before Thanksgiving. I’m not going to expect stuff for Valentines Day. I didn’t go to a Halloween party, although I will continue to buy candy for the kids. I am going to say curmudgeonly things like, ‘When I was a kid, Christmas was a much smaller deal.’ I am not going to buy candy for Easter because my kid is 22 and no longer lives here and I don’t need the calories. I am certainly not going to decorate for anything. No special hear-shaped cookie cutters or cake pans. No napkins with red white and blue on them for Fourth of July.

I’m going to stake out large chunks of the calendar when I’m not observing anything special. I’m going to call that period ‘every day life.’ During the period known as ‘every day life’ I will work and grocery shop and clean my house—but not the way I would clean my house if I was expecting to celebrate a holiday—and ignore the Holiday issue of Martha Stewart Living. I will be bored because nothing special is happening. I’ll watch some TV. And I’m going to observe ‘every day life’ religiously.