Neither my wife or I want chocolates, cards, or gifts – just sleep.

The most romantic thing I can do is get up for the 4 AM feeding (and I probably will) while the most romantic thing she can do (and probably will) is get up for the 7 AM one since I have so much trouble falling back asleep once it’s light out.

We’ve always been good at looking out for each other that way.

In lieu of a traditional column this week I’m directing readers to either watch or read a story I shared last spring about one of the first vacations my wife and I ever took as a dating couple.

She viewed the trip as a fun getaway and opportunity for us to grow closer while I viewed it as a high-stakes gambit where I had to stay on guard the whole time to keep tricking her into liking me.

We both learned a lot about each other that weekend. In retrospect, it’s hard to believe our future lives together were ever anything but certain; luckily, it seems to still be working out.

Please enjoy the video below from Tell Me Another Story’s first-ever online show.

The event raised money and support for Hands on Hartford, a nonprofit providing food, medical and housing assistance to at-need families during the covid crisis. The program was broadcast live on Facebook, YouTube, and Zoom to several hundred viewers around the world on May 01, 2020.

For those who prefer reading, a text version of the story follows below the video.

Shelter from the Storm

I’m driving through the Pennsylvania mountains late at night in the spring of 2009. It’s raining so hard I can barely see in front of me.

The windshield wipers are at maximum speed and they’re old blades so each pass sounds like someone’s choking a sea-lion.

My entire body is tense as giant logging trucks barrel past.

I’m frustrated, but trying to look cool because sitting next to me is Jenny, my girlfriend of nine months. She’s excited because this is one of the first vacations we’ve taken as a couple.

Which is why I’m nervous. This is a big step.

Traveling with someone shows you who they really are and I need to keep tricking her into liking me so instead of saying, “shut up, I can’t see the road!” I say, “your boss said what!? That’s crazy!”

Keep it positive.

I want this vacation to be special, which is tough because we don’t have any money.

I’m a 28-year-old law school student and she’s a 23-year-old, well, 23-year-old.

23-year-olds don’t have money. They have enthusiasm, which is worse.

So we’re heading to Washington, DC where everything is free. Museums, monuments, government buildings, the zoo. All free.

And we’re staying on an air mattress in her cousin’s guest bedroom in Frederick, Maryland which we’re told is right outside Washington, DC, but it is not.

We discover this after finally making it out of the mountains and getting there in the middle of the night.

The next morning we’re packing in a hurry and I want to pack light.

Jenny wants to bring water and snacks, I say no, we won’t get them through security at the museums.

She wants sunblock, I say wear a hat.

She wants an umbrella. The forecast says the chance of rain is 50 percent, don’t be a pessimist. Whatever, I’m not going to argue.

We finally leave and it’s a beautiful day. We make memories at the Capitol, museums and monuments.

Jenny even takes a picture of me giving a finger gesture to the IRS Headquarters. It’s going great.

Until Jenny hits the elevator button at the Federal Triangle subway station and the button replies, “911, what’s your emergency.”

Here’s the thing. I was in Washington on September 11th doing an internship in the United States Senate. I know how intensely they respond to distress calls, so when I hear 911, I sprint.

That’s what you do when you set off an alarm in a place surrounded by terrorist targets, but Jenny stayed put.

As I slink back she’s apologizing to the elevator button, then pushes the right button, which is much larger and very clearly marked, and gets in the elevator with a cheerful, “Sorry!” to the listening operator.

“Why did you run?” she asks as the elevator descends.

“Why didn’t you!? You hit a panic button in the middle of FEDERAL TRIANGLE. There’s probably twenty FBI Agents swarming right now.”

She laughs, “But you came back for me!”

And I should’ve said “YES!” instead I admit, “We were on camera. Probably fifty cameras. As soon as these doors open we’re going to jail.”

The doors open and nobody cares.

No cops are waiting, no FBI agents emerge, the military doesn’t lock down the station.

So we continue to the National Zoo.

We love the panda house but when we leave, the sky has turned black.

As soon as we reach the street, the sky opens up raining even harder than the night before.

I see the subway entrance but it’s a hundred yards away and across an eight-lane road at rush hour.

I grab Jenny’s hand and say “we need to move!” when suddenly the rain stops. Jenny’s taken a tote’s umbrella out of her purse and is holding it over me.

Which means she’s now getting soaked. I grab the umbrella, “What are you crazy!? You’re getting soaked!” now I’m holding it over her.

She says, “You’re getting wet, I feel bad.”

So we’re running down Connecticut avenue fighting over who SHOULDN’T be under the umbrella and keep passing it back and forth until we’re BOTH completely soaked.

Ringing out our clothes on the subway platform, I realize that traveling with someone really does show you who they are.

Even after I showed Jenny that I’ll probably run at the first sign of trouble, she showed me that she’s not only the sort of person willing to give me shelter from a storm, she’d see me stuck alone in the rain and insist on joining me.

Maybe I don’t need to trick her into liking me after all.

Maybe, this is love.

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That alone is enough to fill a cup with cheer and greatly offsets the sorrow I feel from missing so many of our usual traditions this year.

Any other year it would kill me to break my life-long streak of attending Christmas Eve services at the church near where I grew up but with an 8-months-pregnant wife who’s transitioned our moving into a new house right into her pre-birth nesting and with me now constantly watching over a potty training-ish toddler, the break feels like a relief.

While we’ll miss our usual church services, family get-togethers, and flights to see the in-laws, enough of our traditions remain to fulfill me.

Like how half the blinking strands stop blinking a week after the tree goes up or my encroaching dread that an important package hasn’t arrived yet when there’s snow in the forecast and I don’t have a backup gift.

Then there are the traditions I’ll strive to avoid like irritating my wife Jenny by making her sit alone on Christmas Eve because I’ve put off my gift wrapping until the very last minute.

I consider this year a filler Christmas sandwiched between two baby’s firsts with no real sense of what Christmas will look like going forward as a family of four.

I’m grateful for having a chance to look back on all my Christmases past.

My favorite abandoned Christmas tradition came with the great gift card truce (circa 1998) where me, my two brothers, and two step-brothers each handed each other identical $25 Best Buy gift cards.

Faced with the absurdity of walking in with the same number and value of gift cards as we walked out with, we calmly and unanimously declared a gift-giving truce that lasts to this day.

Though spouses and significant others have tried to dissolve it, that moment still stands as both the greatest gift I’ve ever given and received: a life-time pardon from ever having to buy a loved one a gift again. A true Christmas miracle.

Since that truce unfortunately didn’t carry over to our offspring, my new annual tradition is saying, “wait a second, how many nieces and nephews DO we have now? Let’s count them… That is WAY too many to buy each one a gift.”

This year the number climbed to 15 yet still my wife overrules me and buys them each something.

I’m taking an unhealthy amount of joy from the fact that half my family is celebrating in-person next July so I’ll have one more kid and a little more skin in the game against the 15:1 ratio that’s clearly stacked against us.

Though it’s less than a week out, I don’t know what this year’s Christmas will look like.

We ordered a frozen turkey breast but Peapod didn’t deliver it so it’s still an open question of what we’ll have for Christmas dinner.

Despite repeated requests, Jenny refuses to cook me a goose even when I offer to lean out the window and bribe a random street person to fetch us the biggest one hanging in the butcher shop window.

One new tradition I hope to continue is reading my daughter The Night Before Christmas. I can easily picture the next few years but after then it gets murky.

Will it be a joke by the time she’s 12? Will I insist on it when she’s 16, 20, or older?

If I do, will she obey, or will she just say, “whatever Dad, there better be an iBall under the tree tomorrow (an iBall obviously being an Apple device you jam directly into your eye socket to avoid the processing lag that comes between thinking and texting).

Will she someday bring a romantic partner home who I’ll invite to join us, or will it awkwardly be “our thing” that her partner has to silently watch pretending to enjoy?

Or will we miss it for the first time because she’s chosen that partner over me, or because of another global pandemic, or (heaven forbid) because I’m dead?

If so, will she stoically hold the book in her hands and read it aloud while fighting back tears? Or will it just end up in one of the inevitable boxes to be donated after I’ve passed?

It’s impossible to tell and just as likely that I’ll wait too late and she’ll be too tired to sit through the story this year so the tradition dies before it ever takes root.

If so, I’ll roll with it. That’s what I love about holiday traditions: every year is a chance to push the reset button by either creating something new or choosing which ones to repeat.

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It was the first time Mom hadn’t sung happy birthday to one of her kids on their birthday (except for the year she forgot Dan’s birthday) and all of us felt her absence profoundly.

Posing for pictures in the orchard, enjoying fresh-baked treats, and watching my nephews climb the trees were welcome diversions from the inescapable truth that milestone moments would never feel the same.

Less than two months later came Thanksgiving, which was one of Mom’s favorites, and the only holiday we celebrated with her extended side of the family.

My dinner that year was a meatball sub ordered from a gas station at a highway exit somewhere in Pennsylvania and eaten in the passenger seat of my girlfriend Jenny’s car.

Halfway through the meal a single meatball plopped out of the sub streaking sauce down my chest and stomach before splattering onto the seat right between my legs leaving a stain on the seat that never came out.

We paused when that meatball splattered wondering whether to laugh or cry. Thankfully, we laughed.

The trip was our return to Connecticut after nearly three years in Texas.

Thanksgiving fell between two early winter storms that year and served as our best chance to pass through the mountains between her sister’s house in Louisville, Kentucky and our new home in Norwalk, Connecticut.

We didn’t know what to do when Christmas came a month later. We improvised going to Christmas Eve services at the church I grew up with, staying at a charming local hotel, then having an early Christmas dinner with my dad and stepmom before flying to Nashville (where Jenny’s family lives).

In Nashville, Jenny surprised me with a room at the Opryland Hotel, which goes all out for Christmas. We spent the night walking among the shops and lights then closed down the Jack Daniels bar.

If you asked me before Mom died to guess what that first Thanksgiving would look like, I never would’ve gone with gas station meatballs eaten in the passenger seat of an idling car.

And if you’d asked me to guess what Christmas would look like, I definitely wouldn’t have said dinner and drinks at a high-end Nashville tourist trap.

I also wouldn’t have guessed that both of those holidays would end up standing out in my memories as some of my all-time favorites. Turns out, some of the best holiday celebrations are the ones that don’t feel traditional at all.

It took a long time for holidays to start to feel like holidays again but they definitely were – I’ve got the memories to prove it.

Every year Jenny proposes putting the Christmas tree up before Thanksgiving and every year I immediately dismiss it as absurd. “A Christmas tree,” I’ve always said, “should go up no sooner than the day after Thanksgiving.”

Well, our Christmas tree is already up and (if everything went according to plan) tonight I’m eating Thanksgiving dinner even though it’s the Sunday before “Thanksgiving.”

We’re squeezing it in as the grand finale to my mother-in-law’s two-week-long (covid test-approved) visit. After years of playfully bickering over these “ironclad traditions,” we both intuitively recognized that freeing ourselves from traditional constraints was necessary this year.

Anecdotal observations and news reports suggest a lot of people feel that way.

The trick to celebrating a holiday that no longer feels like a holiday is to actually celebrate it. Finding something special in the difficult holidays rejuvenates their meaning.

It’s fine to reminisce about past celebrations and natural to speculate on what you’d be doing at that time in said alternate universe (right now Mom and her sister would be staging their whipped cream fight. Remember how she got when it smudged her glasses?) but you’ve got to push forward with whatever you’ve got.

Even when what you’ve got is just a gas station meatball splattered between your legs. Though it may not seem like it at the time, believe me, it’s reason enough to celebrate.

However you choose to celebrate this year, Happy Thanksgiving!

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I’ve lost track of how many times it’s happened during the fifteen months since I quit my job to care for our daughter.

My response is always the same: my daughter has a mom and she’s clearly better at it than yours if you’re saying something so stupid.

It’s time to destigmatize mothers who choose to include a career as part of their lives. We didn’t spend thousands of dollars and years of our time on my wife’s MBA just to have it sit unused – that’s why we have my law degree.

As a family, we’ve decided that it makes more sense for me to be a stay-at-home dad and for my wife, Jenny to keep working. This doesn’t make her any less of a mother or, conversely, make me any more of a father.

I can assure you, my wife is as much of a mom as any Mom who’s ever mommed. Not that it’s a competition. But if it were, she’d win.

Good parents act in the best interests of their families. Income, health insurance, and economic security are all vital parts of a healthy family, as are safety, nurturing, proper nutrition, and a comfortable home. The family is in crisis when any component is missing.

While my increased availability lists me as the primary caregiver on doctors’ office forms, we’re raising our child in a true partnership. And like everyone else, we’re figuring it out as we go.

Neither of us knows what our family dynamic will look like a year from now. If the global pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that everything can change overnight.

What I do know is that Jenny and I are always going to do what makes the most sense for our family, taking into account our physical, mental, spiritual, and emotional health.

My future could just as easily have me dusting off my marketing portfolio, digging out my law degree, or putting a tiara on a stuffed animal’s head to add some class to our tea party.

I grew up watching sitcoms like Full House and My Two Dads, which were based on the premise that it’s hilarious to think of men as a child’s primary caregiver. That notion is now as outdated as one of Steve Guttenberg’s shirts in Three Men and a Baby.

Yet while society has moved beyond the point where being a stay-at-home dad is a punchline, working moms still keep taking it on the chin.

It isn’t right that so many people are just as quick to praise me, as a man, for having an active role in my daughter’s life while failing to account for the additional burdens Jenny takes on.

It’s ridiculous that working moms get both financially short-changed through pay gaps at work and emotionally short-changed by society.

A relative once reacted as though we were trying to strangle her with one of Betty Crocker’s apron strings when she learned that our division of labor didn’t fall in line with the 1950s norms she grew up cherishing.

Why should we model ourselves after a generation that left us in this mess and raised the generation who are now in charge and lack the character to get us through?

I’m inspired by the way my generation is parenting, especially the mothers who often take on the larger burden, but still never get the kind of credit for it that stay-at-home dads like me get.

In just the past few weeks alone, already overburdened parents have juggled a global pandemic, collapsing economy, and zero-notice mandatory inscriptions as school teachers with dignity, grace and charm while simultaneously managing households amidst overnight shortages in essential hygiene items and substantial disruptions to the food supply.

No matter how a family is adapting to these conditions, they’re heroic simply for having that capability.

This Mother’s Day, let’s finally let go of preconceived notions of gender-specific parenting roles and honor all of the contributions mothers make for their families, especially the ones where they adapt because of unforeseen circumstances.

That’s what we’ll be doing as we take turns handing off the baby to check what’s cooking on the grill.

Unless it rains; then, we’ll figure something else out.

–

Happy Mother’s Day, Lady. Thank you for being the perfect mother for our family. We love you! 

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Storytelling

Check out my new storytelling page featuring three stories from my life touching on subjects of love, loss, and life.

The post Don’t Call Me “Mr. Mom” appeared first on Uncommon Discourse.

It’s as if we’re all heroes of our own stories who’ve made it through the year’s trials, then returned home to get our groove back, and came back out stronger than before.

We return refreshed, emboldened to take on the challenges in front of us. Having taken stock of ourselves with the wind of change at our backs, we dust off our exercise equipment and resolve to be better.

If a typical New Year’s is the turning of a page, a decade-changing New Year’s is the starting of a new notebook. (Note: Don’t be that math guy writing that decades actually start in the 01 year. Nobody actually thinks that way and I’m talking about culture not math.)

But with the leap to 2020 rapidly approaching, the moment somehow feels less significant than normal. Lots of things feel less significant (culturally) than they should right now.

It’s like celebrating in the middle of a fight with your family instead of with your college buddies at a bar that overserves.

You stick the night out for the customary countdown, but by 12:05, everyone’s in their car venting to their significant other about how unfairly they’re being treated.

We’re definitely limping to the finish line of the 2010s, but that’s okay. The past twenty years will likely be considered historical fly-over years if for no other reason than the fact that they’re hard to reference. We never got a good term for them: the aughts then tens.

These decades saw amazing advances in technology and media, but they also saw the commoditization of nostalgia. Not nostalgia for a golden age of enlightenment, like during the Italian Renaissance, but rather for our own childhoods.

Having reached peak cultural frustration, we cast our gaze backwards instead of forwards choosing the past’s safety over the future’s uncertainty.

And when others didn’t come along, we balked. How could the Olsen Twins turn down Fuller House? Don’t they want us to love them anymore!?

No, they’ve grown up.

That love now goes to Kimmy Gibbler. And nobody could ever really love Kimmy Gibbler, so let’s move on.

Going forward with the twenties, thirties, and so on will make the rest our lives much easier to reference. These past decades are just the muddled mess historians can gloss over between the Cold War’s end and whatever follows (probably China).

That’s why I’m not trying to make sense out of what this decade means for our culture. Instead, I’m looking inward taking stock of what this decade meant for me.

I refuse to let the moment go unnoticed. We’re talking about the end of a decade. Even the luckiest of us won’t be able to say that more than ten or eleven times.

Decades have a nice feel to me. I think it’s because I was born in 1980 so they feel like natural time periods. I imagine my thinking would be quite different if I were born in 1983. What an unremarkable sounding year. 1980, however, sounds transformational.

I basically divide my decades as such:
1980s: Childhood.
1990s: Puberty.
2000s: Trying to figure it out.
2010s: Losing a parent, marrying, and becoming a parent.

Not else much seems to matter in retrospect. There were jobs, relationships, accomplishments and mistakes. But their only lasting legacy is this moment, and in this moment (distorted by the lens of time) they all seem small.

There’s no real power in a decade but we cling to the mystique trying to make sense of things.

Keep that in mind when you look at the world this week with “New Year’s eyes.” Don’t just look for tomorrow, look for the decade that lies in front of you and wonder what (within the context of your life) will matter at its end. I’ll bet the list is shorter than you think.

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She grew up in a family where Santa gave all of the presents to the kids and I grew up in one where he gave some of the presents and my parents gave the others.

I refuse to cede any more of the glory than is absolutely necessary. It remains unresolved how this is going to turn out, but, spoiler alert: I’m going to win.

Santa leaves at midnight and I always stay up late. A lot can happen between midnight and Christmas morning. If a few nametags get switched, well, sometimes that’s just the way the cookie crumbles.

Figuring out the whole Santa thing is just one of many landmines first-time parents need to cross in the pivotal year known as Baby’s First Christmas.

“Baby’s first Christmas” is more than an expression; it is a mentality touching every decision made in November or December.

Among the most pressing issues are establishing lifelong family traditions, snagging the all-important Santa-lap photo, fitting in all appropriate family/community/work celebrations, squeezing church into the mix (on a Tuesday night!?), sending an adorable Christmas card to everyone who’s mailing address we know, decorating the house/tree, and (for me, because my wife is crazy) hosting a party for either 17 or 21 people, depending on how the wind blows that particular day.

Nothing says Christmas spirit like making sure your guest bathroom’s toilet is company-coming-over clean. This normally isn’t a problem, but nothing about life with a baby is normal.

Things are just taking longer this year.

For example, decorating the Christmas tree took several days. Probably because I wanted the baby to appreciate each ornament so I’d dangle one in front of her only to take it away when she tried to touch it. If you’ve ever met a baby, you’ll know this is a very good way to make one cry.

But the words, “baby’s first Christmas” kept echoing in my head and I wanted her to be part of it all – so we did it in stages.

And then there are the things we’re adding to our list, which we’ve never done before, like sending Christmas cards.

I now understand why toddlers’ parents pay for professional photo sessions for their Christmas cards.

It’s because they tried to do it on their own when their child was a baby and realized that by the time they’re able to get seasonal pictures with their kids, it’s too late to get cards printed and mailed.

We did get a perfect card, but they got delivered to us yesterday still needing addresses and stamps. Our friends should receive them by Groundhog’s Day.

The major hold-up was wanting to include a picture with Senita on Santa’s lap. We were traveling when the municipal Santa made his good-meaning visit to town so we had to rough it with a free-market Santa.

There, I encountered three very different Santas. The first was chilling at a local candy store trying to rope us in with a half-hearted display advertising the store more than Santa. It wasn’t the right look for our card.

The second was a cash-grab Santa taking advantage of a prime spot in a heavily trafficked Tennessee mall without putting in much effort at all (we passed). And the third was a high-end Santa at the South’s largest Christmas store, where they pulled out all the stops in exchange for photo packages starting at $24.99.

I snapped a few shots with my own camera while the official photographer was distracted. The girl in charge said, “no personal photography,” but Santa cheesed it up for us anyways.

Senita bawled the entire time anyways so we ended up using a different photo (but still included the Santa pic on the back of our card because it makes us laugh).

Maybe that’s the best you can hope for with a baby’s first Christmas. Enough fun and memorable moments to blur the line between laughter and tears.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all!

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I’ve taken a lot of naps this year. It’s definitely the year I’ve napped the most since kindergarten, or maybe freshman year of college.

I’m not sure that a single period of sleep from the first month of Senita’s life was long enough to be considered anything but a nap.

I’ve always been a napper but prior to Senita’s birth I called it “watching the news.” As soon as my wife came home I’d sit upright on the couch and with bleary eyes and a pillow imprint on one side of my face swear I’d merely been watching the news.

Nobody judges babies or the elderly for napping but wedding-planning brides definitely judge their napping fiances. This year I was pleased to find this sweet spot in the middle of my life where naps are socially acceptable again.

Everyone said when we brought the baby home to, “sleep when the baby sleeps,” and just like that decades of nap shaming melted away.

Although, “sleep when the baby sleeps” is a stupid expression people mindlessly repeat just because they’ve heard it so many times themselves.

Obviously, I’ll sleep when the baby sleeps; anything else would be negligent.

Here’s a response you’ll never hear to “Hey honey, where’s the baby?”: “Oh she’s in the bathtub splashing around. I figured she could chill in there while I take a quick nap.”

It goes without saying that parents sleep when the baby sleeps, but for us stay-at-home parents, a baby’s naps are vital for more than just our own rest, they’re vital for our sanity.

I’m more thankful for the naps Senita’s taken this year than I am for the ones I’ve taken.

Without her naps I’d never shower and only rarely eat. Her naps are my times of solace. This sentence was written during one of her naps.

They afford me great stretches of silence, allowing me to familiarize myself with the clankings and hums of our house.

It’s said a newborn baby can recognize it’s mother’s voice from across the room, but it’s also true that a stay-at-home parent can recognize their hot-water-heater from across the house.

It’s also nice when she naps out on the road, providing me an opportunity to interact with the world without interrupting every thirty seconds to say, “don’t put that in your mouth.”

Some people can’t nap in public, but that’s not a problem for either of us. Traveling naps are some of my favorite. I love nodding off in a car or a plane and being surprised by how much time and distance have passed.

Senita takes this to a whole new level. She’s napped this year in some pretty interesting spots beyond the typical cars and cribs.

She slept through an entire family party celebrating a nephew’s first communion and through a July Fourth party on her raft while floating in a pool.

She frequently naps in walks around the neighborhood and has taken isolated naps in magical places like Disney World and Niagara Falls. How special it is to nap beside a natural wonder of the world.

This is a family trait passed down through the generations. My father is famous for having napped through an attack on his military outpost in Vietnam and I once napped through a work-bonding day where we were forced to watch a 3D movie of The Hobbit.

Perhaps my favorite napping day is Thanksgiving, which provides some prime opportunities like the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, the period between dinner and pie, and sitting in the car while your wife runs into one last store to check on their Black Friday deals.

If you’re looking for me this Thursday after the wishbone’s been snapped and the pie’s been served you’ll probably find me on the couch with my head down and my eyes closed still giving thanks.

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This week I’m breathing a sigh of relief because of an important Halloween decision my wife Jenny and I made: we’re a store-bought costume household. Aggressively so.

We’ll still have problems, sure. We already had to find supplemental leggings to make my daughter’s Snow White costume compatible with an outdoor party. 

But if I continue playing my cards right, my future will have no face-painting panic attacks, no split- seam meltdowns, and no frantic trips to Goodwill trying to find clothes we can cut holes into.

We’re outsourcing our Halloween costume anxiety to qualified professionals. I love pop-up Halloween stores; it’s nice when carnies can come off the road for a few weeks to rest inside a former Radio Shack.

The National Retail Federation predicts $8.8 billion will be spent on Halloween this year, with $3.2 billion being spent on costumes for kids, pets, and adults. It appears that the era of homemade costumes is over.

This couldn’t come at a better time for me, a new parent just stepping back into the Halloween costume arena after a decades-long absence.

In college, I regularly put on a windbreaker and baseball cap and called myself an umpire. When people told me it didn’t count as a costume, I’d bump them with my belly and eject from the party. It was a cop-out sure, but it got me through all four years without misallocating a penny of my precious beer money.

For anyone reading this in a fit of indignation, please, by all means continue making your own costume if you’re going to be creative. But you aren’t. You’re going to plagiarize an idea from Pinterest, which has all the creativity of a paint-by-number. 

The only difference between a store-bought Halloween costume and a Pinterest-inspired costume is the number of items in your Amazon cart.

Plus there’s now the amplification of social media. After all, if you didn’t post a picture of your costume, did you even really wear one?

Social media also escalates the consequences for homemade costumes that don’t come together well. At least three costumes throughout my childhood easily could’ve been included in costume fail compilations.

(For those who don’t know, fail compilations are where predatory social media marketers republish humiliating pictures of children for their own profit and enjoyment.)

My first costume fail was dressing as a kangaroo in Kindergarten.

Mom sewed me a saggy brown costume complete with a pouch for a toy kangaroo I had that hopped when you squeezed it. 

It wasn’t until we were lining up for the costume parade that I realized this made me a girl kangaroo. 

The obvious play was to swap the pouch for boxing gloves, which I clearly should’ve needed in 1985 after getting on the school bus as a kangaroo with a pouch.

The next costume fail came a few years later when mom put a plastic cheerleader’s pom-pom on my head and called me one of the McDonald’s Fry Guys, even though I just looked like a kid with a pom-pom on his head. I just had to go along with it as if I didn’t want to be a Ghostbuster.

After that, I got to pick out my costume and chose a store-bought Freddy Kreuger glove. However, I didn’t own anything remotely resembling a striped sweater so I went in a polo shirt as if everyone’s nightmares suddenly took place on casual Friday.

I’m very fortunate to have been raised as the youngest child in a time where cameras still used film, and taking more than one picture of anything was considered a waste of money. Just like store-bought Halloween costumes.

It’s amazing how times change.

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These posts have become as reliable a part of our American tradition as local news stories speculating on the best Super Bowl commercials. They are reliable views in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

Of course, the anti-Columbus posts are answered with equal passion by posts railing against PC culture and “libtards” who’ve gotten out of control. The heartland will explode tomorrow with retweets from accounts with names like Sons of Freedom and Patriotic Defenders of Liberty.

Russia’s got their outrage machine dialed way up for this one.

So what are we to do? While I’m usually all for bullying a ghost, I’d prefer to see our country get in front of the outrage by changing Columbus Day to Capitalism Day.

That’s what people are really reacting to on Columbus Day – Columbus’ entrepreneurial gumption mixed with the callousness for humanity that followed.

Capitalism’s history isn’t any less controversial than Christopher Columbus’, but de-personalizing the conversation lets us place it within the wider arc of history. To weigh the good of things like life-saving drugs against the darker parts like sweatshops and economic disparities we struggle to control.

It’s a conversation we need to have – regularly and often: how to balance the best and worst parts of our economic system.

It’s also a more fruitful conversation than judging dead peoples’ morals.

When it comes to America, capitalism is king. That’s as true today as it was back then.

Columbus didn’t sail west in search of new rules of parliamentary procedure, he wanted that next spice everyone would just have to have.

Christopher Columbus’ modern counterparts don’t work for NASA, they work for Frito Lay pushing out weird new potato chip flavors like Biscuits & Gravy.

Pumpkin Spice is more important to most of our lives than the Administrator of the FDA even though he’s the one responsible for ensuring there isn’t opium mixed in with our seasonal latte.

Nobody pushed the western frontier hoping to draft a resolution, they did it to line their pockets with gold and tell their former oppressors to shove off.

Those impulses still move us.

Capitalism has learned how to squeeze profit from disagreement. We’re fracking our civility so opportunists can make a living off the back of other people’s outrage.

There are now entire industries making their livelihoods telling others to shove off from academics to Buzzfeed writers and political activists.

On Capitalism Day we’ll celebrate that all of these whackos can make a living from these deep-held convictions, even when they rise to the level of farce.

It’s a bubble that’s bound to burst. The books don’t add up. Societal outrage has been grossly inflated and shifted around like Enron dollars so that everyone has a claim to it but nobody can pin it down.

I don’t know anyone who actually has an all-or-nothing view of others.

Who are these people and how do they get through life without being left entirely alone? Haven’t they ever had a family member cheat on their spouse, an appallingly racist relative, or a brother who’s a dick? I’ve had all of those but I’m not changing my last name over it.

Though if I were going to change my last name it would be something that sounds awesome following Chris, like P. Taco.

Despite the outrage spinning around on Facebook, I know it hasn’t reached critical mass yet because I keep seeing a commercial where Christopher Columbus’ likeness is sitting in a hot tub to promote this week’s low prices on all hot tubs and jacuzzi’s.

But the time is fast approaching.

Eight states and more than 130 cities have changed Columbus Day to some variation of Indigenous Peoples Day. That’s a worthy alternative, but one that feeds right back into the outrage by seeming to take something from one class of people and just to give it to another.

Columbus Day has been compromised. It’s time to push off for new shores. It’s what Columbus himself would’ve done. Once he raised the capital to pay for it.

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This pattern (at least in New England) is modeled after peak crop-growing times and roughly correlates with the passage of seasons.

Then I spent three summers in Austin, Texas (or as they call it: years).

By mid-summer of my first year there local news stations openly speculated that we could break the record of 69 days over 100 degrees.

They were right; we ended the summer with 90 days over 100 degrees. The last day to hit that mark was September 30th.

Believe me when I say that September is still very much a summer month.

Of course, you don’t have to believe me. You could just check a calendar which has the autumnal equinox falling on Monday, September 23, 2019.

Nevertheless, people believe they can dictate the seasons based on either their occupations or on how they feel.

They say things like “I’m a teacher so for me, the summer’s over two weeks earlier than everyone else.” That’s fine, but it is an oversimplification equating vacation time with seasons, which aren’t nearly the same.

What about the stay-at-home parent who is taking their first breath since June? Don’t ruin their parade with your pumpkin-spiced rain.

Or they’ll say things like, “Fall’s my favorite season, bring on the scarves and cider!” as if fashion and accessories can dictate the season.

If this were true, we’d have to celebrate the yuletide every time a teenager swapped out their parents’ peppermint schnapps with extract-flavored water. And I know that’s not the case because we only celebrated Christmas once during my sophomore year of high school.

Society enables these premature equinoxicators by gleefully scrubbing summer from our retail shelves. Like most holidays, Labor Day is celebrated through discount prices on name brand mattresses.

But it’s real market power comes from back-to-school shoppers who pick the bones of summer clothing clean during clearance sales strategically aligned to meet with our state’s sales-tax-free week.

But as quickly as our tank tops are pushed aside for notebooks, those get brushed aside for snack-sized candy bars and hollow plastic pumpkin baskets.

Our strip malls are already haunted by Halloween pop up stores sticking their highly flammable hands out from the shallow graves we dug for them last November.

I refuse to be influenced by the petty politics of retail store buyers, which is why I shop almost exclusively on Amazon, where I can buy a $4 Paw Patrol Beach Ball or a $12 Charlie Brown Christmas Tree at any time of year.

My summer doesn’t wrap up for Labor Day, it ramps up.

I like every Facebook picture showing a friend’s kid going back to school. Not because I care about the kid, simply because I know summer is about to get a whole lot less crowded.

The first change is usually evident at the coffee shop when my order is no interrupted by my barista squealing when her pajama-bottoms-clad bestie shows up.

Buying into the notion that Labor Day is the unofficial start to summer is a fool’s errand. Like listening to the boss who says, “we technically don’t have to be here until 9 but that means we should be at our desks ready to go by 8:55.”

Quit acting like an ant when you’re living in a grasshopper world.

Enjoy your unofficial start to fall and back-to-the-grindstone mentality. Next week, I’ll be in the same place I’ve been for the last nine years: enjoying a week-long summer vacation in Cape Cod. It’s so much lovelier once everyone else is gone.

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