It all starts with the rotting rictus of deflated Jack-O-lanterns. Moldering away to mock the dread I feel of knowing the time that is coming.

I fucking swear when I was a kid we got a few extra weeks to promote some absurd ideas about Indians and celebrate the wholesale slaughter of some red blooded American Turkeys before this shit started to hit the deck.

Times have changed and Pimp Daddy Claus wants to make dead sure that bitch betta have his money, so the stink of mutilated gourds on the porch hails his coming before the lingering scent of cheap creame make-up and vinyl capes has even blown out of the neighborhood like a kinderbat at a Snoop Dog show.

The weather turns to shit and you get to spend time thinking about everything you ever did wrong with your life. Wasted opportunities and bad ideas that left you further behind than when you started or took you some place you never wanted to be. It seems like Fall turning to Winter is when we get to scribble out some half assed road maps of our lives with hindsight and broken Crayola if only for the sake of showing the wrong turns.

Drinking heavily helps.

It's a great springboard for the mania to come.

Once December starts rolling in you can feel it, like the flesh that pricks when you hear nails on the chalkboard. It's marketed to you. They pitch it and they spin it and they stuff it down your throat like you're a blonde co-ed in the latest edition of Sorority Gang Bang. You can see it in the television, in the films, on the radio and in the way people drive around with clenched teeth. It's in the way they walk with hunched shoulders like a washer woman with pails too heavy to bare or a Silverback Gorilla stomping in for the kill.

It's like a warzone in the mall if you smell the air. Fear, Anger, Hysteria and Defeat. They all have a scent if you know what to smell. They'll teach it to you for $59.99+ tax and if you order it today you'll get a complimentary sense of validation, just in time for the holidays.

Once we hit December week 3, some of them don't even look like people anymore, more like rejects from a Romero project that got loose on the world. Shell shocked Zombies wander around aimlessly or with a sense of purpose that has no direction, trying to find that one thing they came to find but can't remember what it is. Some winter socks for Mom? A new scarf for Kathy? Maybe it was a soul? Too bad nothing you want is in stock.

It's all I can do to not grab a Cheese Log in one hand, a Winter Sausage in the other and start a killing, burning cycle of mayhem that won't stop till I hit North Dakota and am brought to a dead halt by the dread fascination of wondering what the fuck people do with themselves there.

More often than not, all too sudden, the day is upon us. The dread of your past mistakes turns into a hysterical frenzy to validate your existence with absurd consumerism until you are about to retch up egg-nog laced bile over every yahoo at every phony holiday party full people you don't really give a shit about that you had to attend because if you didn't get your Mastercard issued allotment of holiday cheer you'd be strung up with mistletoe by the grinch police and shot through with candy cane as a terrorist. And then it's over. The terrible season is over and the year is coming to an end. The week after is a quiet before the storm of New Years Eve, where you can swear off your old mistakes and turn over a new leaf to the tune of some random nudity and passing out in a pool of your own vomit.

New Years Can't get here fast enough, Ho Ho Ho.