I’ve begun to embrace the early celebrating, considering “All I Want for Christmas is You” was stuck in my head over a week ago.

It’s August and Halloween feels around the corner. It’s there in the half-joking social media posts, ignoring the 80° weather and saving pumpkin-bordered lines of text. Skeletons make appearances next to ghosts that aren’t the passing remains of summer, found in the shortening days and approaching year. It’s almost autumn and that means Halloween.

Christmas arrives on the store shelves long before October 31st: red and green cookies on the outsides of aisles that lead to assorted bags of candy. No pine trees yet but the skulls and tombstones and felt bats are always unexpectedly short-lived. More blue tins of Danish cookies than usual. “Monster Mash” plays once.

The temperatures drop from 70° to 30° real quickly, and then continue to oscillate through all of November. It feels like the end of a season: Thanksgiving approaching, the year wrapping up. Christmas songs begin on the radio around November 20th at the latest, though they’re still interspersed with the usual fare. Some stores and houses are already decorated, lights and garlands dripping off eaves, electric snowflakes spanning semaphores. Thanksgiving passes and knit sweaters break out in full force; snowman-bedecked socks find their ways out of the bottom of drawers; Christmas music is almost all that’s heard.

Do I still complain about already having heard it for a couple weeks and it having lost any novelty?; I still complain about not hearing it a day after the 25th. I still enjoy the decorated houses, the fairy lights, the sweaters and the cookies. I comment on the consumerism as I do my own shopping. The music really is too loud sometimes. I buy another pair of mugs, these with festive-looking cardinals. I’m ready for a month of carols.

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— Lora