KENNYWOOD’S HOLIDAY LIGHTS EVENT IN 2024 | PHOTO BY SEAN COLLIER

Last week, someone presented me with an absurd claim: They asserted that we were in the midst of neither the Halloween nor the Christmas season.

Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, we are in the sliver of the calendar where those holidays both reign. For a few weeks in early November, holiday-themed commercials arrive and Christmas lights start to twinkle — yet the last dying gasps of Spooky Season remain.

In fact, the weekend guide I wrote last week had both a holiday market in Harmony and a Halloween-adjacent play — Prime Stage’s “Mr. Edgar A. Poe Presents,” which continues through this Sunday, thus concluding closer to Thanksgiving than to Halloween.

When I visited Kennywood for Phantom Fall Fest a few weeks ago, a most curious structure rose up above the haunted houses and smiling skeletons. What was this shadowy edifice? Why, a Christmas tree, of course. The park had less than two weeks’ break between the end of its Halloween activities and the beginning of Holiday Lights (set for this Friday). There simply wasn’t enough time to mount their dazzling tree après-ghoul.

The traditionalists will likely grumble about this development, of course. Why does Christmas start so early? Why are people going to haunted houses in August? What happened to Thanksgiving? Is there no time left on the calendar where one can have their yard blessedly free of inflatable decor?

Easy as it is to grouse about such commercial signifiers — and I do have a side rant about the loss of identity in the Reese’s holiday eggs — I have to consider this general yule-washing of the calendar to be a net positive.

Look at the examples I’ve mentioned. (Not the peanut-butter egg one … but all the rest.) Halloween attractions, extra trips to Kennywood, holiday markets and theatrical productions. The kind of community-defining endeavors we love and value — and, more importantly, stuff that gets people out of the house.

As the weather changes, the tendency to nest grows. We’re living in an alarmingly isolated and housebound era to begin with; when the calendar creeps toward its back pages, that urge only gets stronger. For many of us, the winter can be a time when days or even weeks pass without venturing beyond house, car and work.

The more Halloween and Christmas bring us out of those shells, the better. In my experience, events and gatherings tied to either Spooky Season or the winter holidays tend to draw more people than similar occasions throughout the rest of the calendar. If that means visiting a haunted house in early September or a holiday market a week into November, that’s fine; I just want people to be out and about in their communities.

Let’s be honest: Come February, you’re not going to be able to pry us off our couches with crowbars. Whatever the occasion, it’s good to get out while we can.