No, Thanksgiving is, of course, the gateway to the Christmas Season, which many people prefer to call “the holiday season,” considering that to be more correct.

Really it is the Christmas Season, though. I don’t say this for religious reasons or because I believe there is a conspiracy afoot to kill Christmas, and the fact that I prefer the plain red Starbucks cups to the tacky holly jolly ones of previous years is totally irrelevant. In fact the Starbucks cup controversy, like everything people say about Christmas, is totally irrelevant, because Christmas just is. Christmas will not be denied.

Christmas is huge, Christmas is absolutely enormous, it is coming soon to eat up all of our money and suck up all of our air, and it is no earthly use pretending otherwise.

What with Santa Claus and the little twinkly lights and the stockings hung with care and all, it is Christmas, in both its secular and spiritual aspects, that is coming to town. I guess we can look the other way and ignore it for a little while longer.

At our peril.

Scientists and mathematicians will of course disagree with me, but I have always maintained that time is not quantifiable. Some hours are actually much longer than others. Some weeks just blow by while other weeks move like cluster flies on their last legs. You know it’s true.

It’s coming. You probably still think that you have time to get ready. Women’s magazines and morning television shows are telling us how to fashion homemade gifts for our loved ones this year because, in spite of the so-called economic upturn and cheap gas, wages are stagnant and food prices are sky high, but go ahead and have a holly jolly whatever anyway. Personally, I think that women’s magazine and morning television show writers just sit around making up this claptrap and then watch to see whether people go for it. Look at me, I’m a trendsetter!

Some are advising consumers not to buy anything unless they can force retailers or wholesalers into drastically reducing their prices, thereby giving them a huge discount. The disseminators of these helpful hints don’t seem to realize that retailers, wholesalers and their employees and the vendors who supply them will all have a dreadful Christmas if enough of these thrifty consumer tips take ahold. Why not give equal time to advising shopkeepers, manufacturers, artisans, farmers and others who are trying to sell their wares?

“Leave your thumb on the scale when you weigh out the produce,” for example.

Maybe you are heeding the make-it-yourself advice, and, if so, why bother dragging out all of these projects now, you are saying to yourself, when there are so many other, more important things to avoid doing?

The answer is that the closer Christmas gets, the faster time moves. As you might recall, every year I compare this phenomenon to floating downstream on a raft or an Adirondack guide boat. At first, the current carries you imperceptibly along; you trail your fingers in the water and ponder making a list.

Soon you notice that your craft is gaining speed. Faster and faster you go, until before you know it you are hurtling helter skelter between the boulders. What is that awful roaring sound? A freight train? A tornado? No, it is the falls of Christmas up ahead. Help! It is higher than Niagara Falls, and there is no turning back. You’re going over!

When you come to, you’re sitting in a chair with a mug of coffee in your hand, or perhaps eggnog with rum in it, and it’s Christmas Day, and there is colorful wrapping paper all over the floor, and you are wishing, once again, that you had done more for the people who mean so much to you, and look at this really very nice muffler that your sister must have spent so many evenings crocheting with you in mind, and you blearily resolve that next year, next year, you will start earlier. A word to the wise: It’s already pretty late in the game to be embarking on a muffler now unless you use those giant crochet hooks.

All right, I absolutely have to get busy.

Have a good week.