November is a sombre month. I know it’s right in the heart of my favorite season but I generally don’t care for November.
September and October are what Fall is all about. The cooling weather, the changing leaves. Pumpkin spiced everything. I know people tend to overdo it on that but still it’s in the spirit of the season.
I remember some of the cool Falls of my childhood with some of my brothers and their friends playing football on the front lawn.
Everyone in jeans and sweatshirts playing tag football that would inevitably degenerate into tackle football. Eating a mouth full of grass and pine needles as I got driven into the turf.
Raking, raking, raking piles of pine needles in the front of the house. Piles that seemed to be as tall as myself. Resisting the urge to jump into them and then stuffing them into trash sacks and getting poked all over.
School, the beginning of the school year with all its changes. New teachers, new classes, new classmates. It fits so perfectly with those first couple of months of Fall. Excitement in the air as the new school football season starts and everyone is wide-eyed, hopeful, and optimistic for a glorious season.
The colors and excitement of Halloween, the first of the 4 harvest festivals recognized in western culture. The careful planning to pick out a costume, the parties to plan and attend, the festivities to mark as the season seems to build to a crescendo.
But then November occurs. A sort of anticlimactic feeling comes down over everything. November isn’t a bad or harsh month. The weather isn’t bitingly cold as January but the days after Halloween feel like a bad hangover. The colorful Halloween costume now looks ridiculous in the cold light of November.
Trees are freshly denuded of their lush leaves and now look something like a plucked chicken shivering in the cool weather.
That glorious football season has now either totally collapsed into defeat after defeat or it’s just lingering on too long. School has become a daily grind of getting lesson after lesson done and waiting for the next test or quiz.
November is a serious month for serious people to get serious work done. The big holiday of the month, Thanksgiving, is itself a serious and intensive celebration of labor. Getting food prepared, the house clean, the silverware and settings all cleaned and ready for guests and finally the family all scrubbed and polished for the saturnalian repast.
I suppose that November is meant to be a breather. A time to mentally prepare for the next two festivals of the end of the year that come so close together. Christmas and New Years come at the same time to herald the onset of Winter and the beginning of the year to come.
November seems to be one of those oddball months without a defined character of its own. Like April and August it doesn’t seem to fit very well in the calendar year and just seems to drag on.
But really it’s not their fault. Some month has to hold those slots and they just happened to be picked.
All we can really do is hope that they will pass as quickly as possible.
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