Wait, today is what, exactly?

I’m so confused.

On the one hand, it’s Halloween today, huzzah!  As I’ve tried to make abundantly clear in past posts, Halloween is my favorite holiday. It’s dear to me to the point that I’d happily argue at length that it ought be a paid Federal holiday.

On the other hand, thought, it’s Monday.

Yeah, right.  Monday.

Monday and good times fit together about as well as Kim Kardashian and her ex-husband (too soon?).

My brain is trying very very hard to reconcile these two things.  But non-off-day holidays on a Monday just muddy up the whole thing.  So, inside my brain, two rival factions were having a Less Filling, Tastes Great tug of war: I’m pumped (holiday!), and I’m "meh" (Monday…), but it’s fun (holiday!), yet there’s work (Monday…).

Lather rinse repeat.

If people were off today, this wouldn’t be problem.  But I guess I’ve been down this road recently.  No point beating that horse any deader.

Maybe this conflicting feeling is exacerbated by the cues I’ve gotten by the people around me, namely my kids and my coworkers.

Obviously, when my kids woke up this morning, they nearly sprung from bed like those tiny rubber super balls and bounced off the walls, ceilings, lamps, and any other potentially destructible solid in the house.

Wait, did I say super ball?  Scratch that.  Flubber.  They were straight-up flubber.  All you had to do was whisper "trick-or-treat", and that would set ’em in motion.  After that, well, they just kept going, and going, and going….bouncy, bouncy, bouncy. 

Yep, this morning my kids were enthusiasm-power perpetual motion machines, smiling at me with huge, shiny, pre-Halloween eyes every time I looked at them.

Which makes me think: odd that I can buy a bag of Three Musketeers any time I want, and never do, but, for a kid, the thought of dragging a sack full of them through the neighborhood, given freely, can generate such excitement.

The general feeling when I got to office, though, could only be described as the polar opposite.  Not only were several cases of the "Mondays" in evidence, a goodly number of my co-workers seemed saddled with the residual effects of weekend activities. 

What I mean, of course, is that as they’re typically younger, and, um, freer of spirit than I am at this stage in my life, they could go to Halloween parties Saturday without having to pay a babysitter.

As a result, not only do I suspect that some of them were fighting the weariness marking the last tenacious clutches of a Halloween Party Hangover, but I’m pretty sure the holiday exists only for them in the past tense.  Because, let’s face it, once the party has come and gone, you’ve done your morning walk of shame, and consumed every last nibblet of link sausage from the Frisch’s Sunday Breakfast Bar while still wearing clown face paint, well, one’s celebrating is official done.

So, yes, as of this morning, my non-parental colleagues had moved on to Veteran’s Day and were already secretly entertaining their first wicked thoughts of Black Friday sales.

See why I’ve been feeling a little conflicted?  One one hand, flubber.  On the the other, the post-holiday hangovers.

Nonetheless, as soon as I parked my car after work and took those first few steps around the neighborhood surrounded by ghosts, goblins, and nuclear blue-haired Katy Perrys(?), Halloween settled comfortably on my shoulders like an old friend.

And I guess that’s the thing about holidays: it doesn’t really matter if you’re feeling it before or just over it, because once the time comes for to break out those familiar holiday habits, well, everything seems to become very, very clear.

Plus, there were Snickers.  They always clear things up.

Pud’n