ince the Puritan distrust of this great feast day abated, the American people… have taken up Christmas with the same enthusiasm that lately almost buried funerals under a weight of floral tributes.”

The editorial was published in December 1886, in the Manitoba Daily Free Press. Christmas is too commercial, the unnamed editorialist laments. Shopping, he believes, has become the raison d’être of the holiday, which in its present state will be worn out in little more than a decade.

“We readily incline to excess,” he writes, “to an excess that destroys the object we seek.”

Critiques of commercialism are a holiday tradition, as customary as carolling and candy canes. If it’s not commercialism, it’s something else: Santa Claus is the Devil, Santa damages children’s psyches, the pressure to shop for Christmas presents forces men to do what is properly women’s work. Defenders of Christmas include both Christians and non-Christians; or, as the New York Times once put it, “The corruption of Christmas has been roundly decried by everyone, whether they shop at Bloomingdale’s or Wal-Mart.”

Christmas is always about to be corrupted; the faithful are always decrying its corruption.

I myself attempted to corrupt it.

I did it in the name of Halloween.

erry Christmas!” I yelled. “Merry Christmas!” When I was six, I was an elf. I was in the Santa Claus Parade in Peterborough, Ontario, my hometown. I was standing on the final float, Santa’s float, with the other elves.

The float in front of us was Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The Jack of Hearts was played by a boy a tad older than me. He was beautiful. I waved to him. During the course of the parade, I developed a crush on him. If it wasn’t my first crush, it was pretty close to it. I didn’t tell anybody about it. I knew there was something monstrous about liking a boy. It made me monstrous.

Halloween was more my style.

I don’t associate homosexuality with Halloween; I do, however, associate my homosexuality with Halloween.

As a boy, I went trick-or-treating as a witch. I went as a skeleton. I was Dracula. Since I felt like a monster, why not be a monster whom others feared?

On my dresser, I had a Dracula model kit. On my bookshelf, I had a werewolf mask, which I kept beside my werewolf books, The Wolfman and The Werewolf of London. A poster of Lon Chaney, the Man of a Thousand Faces, was tacked on my wall. I had read all about him, about the pains he took to distort and disguise his body.