Contain Christmas! / 31 Days of Halloween.

People like to debate if atheists can/should enjoy Christmas.  I say we can and should if we'd like.  Since having a daughter, I love Christmas as much as anybody.  I love getting together with my family and seeing how much we can all tolerate one another.  I love celebrating that I have them and they haven't found a way to get rid of me yet.  I love giving (and, yeah, receiving) presents that just don't fit into the everyday budget.  I like getting stuff for my folks and my wife and our daughter that they wouldn't buy themselves and I like that they'll pity my poor tastes and do the same for me.

I don't love Christmas for its religious purposes, but it's fine with me if you do.  Any excuse to gather loved ones and treat one another to a little gift is okay by me.  Let's do it every year; raise a glass for anything that makes people cheerier.  I say "Happy Holidays" but that's only because I don't have time to say "Merry Christmas and a Happy Hannukah, Kwanzaa, New Year's, Ramadan, Winter Solstice and so on that you and yours may celebrate in the four- to six-week window surrounding today."

But here's the thing.  I love Christmas as a two-day celebration.  Christmas Eve, Christmas Day.  Granted, I remember starting to get excited about it at the beginning of December when I was in grade school, but I always made a point to wish the Jewish kids a Happy Hannukah because I didn't want them to feel like I didn't care about them too.  I love Christmas as a two-day celebration, used to start thinking about my wish list just after the Thanksgiving leftovers got thrown out, but that was it.

And then something flexed its might over November by making "Black Friday" a term known to more than just those of us who worked in retail.  Suddenly it was a holiday on its own.  Before I knew it, all the stores started putting up Christmas decorations in mid-November.  It was one thing to step on other December holidays, but to encroach upon Thanksgiving?  Was the 25th of December a more powerful force than that whole Mayflower thing?  But I tried to keep quiet, didn't wanna be a rabble-rouser and come across as anti-Christian.  Religion may not all line up for me, but it does to 250 million Americans or so, so I didn't wish to offend.

And then it finally happened.  Santa Claus poked belly first into October, crossing that US/Mexico-like border that means so much to me.  This year, Christmas ads started airing in mid-September.  But Halloween's where I draw the line, let alone September.  I knew a fair number of pagans in and after college, and they hold October 31 in extremely high regards.  It's Samhain, the old Celtic New Year.  Some pagans celebrate their New Year's Day on February 2, sure, but a lot hold October 31 as the day.

For me it's just a day I get to dress myself (when I was younger) or my kid (now) up in a silly costume and run around the neighborhood collecting wrapped sugar, but its roots are in fear and death...which sounds glum, I know, but hear me out.  In Mexico, La Dia de los Muertos - The Day of the Dead - honors and celebrates the lives of those who have passed on.  It reminds me of a New Orleans funeral dirge or an Irish wake, conjuring images of "O Captain My Captain" and accepting death as a "mission accomplished" point of this life, which helps people cope with the tragedy and sadness of losing a loved one.  Accept the negative, but focus on the positive.  Boy I like that.  Not everyone believes in eternal life after death, and that makes me appreciate the here and now even more.

The other side of that coin is that we also have "life instincts" and "death instincts" - nurturing and destructive habits that remind us of both ends of the spectrum - and to me, getting scared out of my wits is a much more "my style" death instinct to practice than street racing, doing 150mph on a motorcycle, jumping out of an airplane and so on.  So I love a good horror movie.  I love blood and guts and panic and monsters and zombies and evil and mayhem, so long as it's all fictitious.

And herein lies the dilemma.  Christmas, generally accepted as a celebration of the birth of the Christian messiah/lord and savior Jesus Christ, is often a day of reverence for divine power, which in turn leads many to focus especially on a joy of life and fond reminiscence on the dearly departed.  And again, that's perfectly fine by me.  I wouldn't want to step on a day specifically devoted to that kind of awe-inspired appreciation of the value of life.  Unfortunately, Halloween isn't being treated with the same respect by...well, let's be honest: marketing departments.

This back-and-forth between ghosts and St. Nick isn't necessarily a bad thing.  It gave us The Nightmare Before Christmas, after all.  Tim Burton is said to have gotten the idea for the story when he saw a department store window clearing out Halloween decorations and replacing them with Christmas ones.  (Fun conversation: ask your friends if The Nightmare Before Christmas is a Halloween movie or a Christmas movie)  And I'd like to do my part where holiday boundary awareness is concerned.  In a fun, jovial, well-spirited way, I'd like to invite you to join me this year on my annual 31-day campaign, Contain Christmas.

Starting October 1 and ending on Halloween night I'm going to watch, at minimum, one horror movie per night.  31 days of Halloween - minimum.  Now, as a counteractive measure, I may extend some bonus rounds into early November, just for the sake of helping The Turkey get some breathing room too.  I can't cook and eat turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy and stuffing for 20+ days leading up to Thanksgiving so someone else will have to come up with a ritual equally as stubborn and narrowly-focused to be a November counterpart to October's bout of Contain Christmas.  After 31 nights of dismemberment and dysfunction, I'm pretty pooped.

Here's the rules.

0)  If you can't make 31?  No problem!  Just let us know when you watch a horror flick (see below).
1)  Otherwise...One horror movie per night at least.
2)  They can't all be zingers, but if you have more than 31 horror movies at your ready disposal, try to cut from the bottom of the deck, yeah?
3)  If you don't have 31 horror movies at your disposal, dip into sci-fi.
4)  Plan 9 from Outer Space and The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra perfectly fine.  Twilight not accepted.
5)  If you miss a night, try to double-down the next night (or in advance if you know you can't do one later).
6)  Above all else, track your progress on Facebook.  Find the event itself (starting on October 1) through facebook.com/ACarrierofFire and invite your friends.

So find yourself more than 30 scary movies, kiddies.  You've got one week to prepare.  Expect updates throughout the month.  Just to reiterate: there's nothing anti-Christmas about this fun little tradition of ours; we just think that Halloween, Thanksgiving and December deserve their own appreciation time.  If The Turkey started gobbling all over October, Contain Christmas would be called Throttle Thanksgiving.

Happy Halloween!