There are days I feel like the last surviving gatekeeper to tradition. My mission is to keep the holidays from crashing into one another.

In my rich fantasy world, Labor Day is followed by Halloween, Halloween is followed by Thanksgiving and Thanksgiving is followed by Christmas. Never do they meet, mix or mingle. Welcome to dreamland.

The early Christmas bombardment at the big box stores in 90-degree heat of late summer is disorienting. This is why you see dazed people in the parking lot wildly waving key fobs in the air trying to locate their vehicles.

I’ve heard the reasoning: It’s almost Halloween, so it’s almost Thanksgiving, so it’s almost Christmas. With that line of thought, it’s also almost my birthday.

Our son’s family FaceTimed us on Halloween so we could see the costumes the kids wore for trick-or-treating. The whole family was gathered in front of a fire roaring in the fireplace — next to a lighted Christmas tree.

“When did the tree go up?” I casually asked.

“Oh, it appeared sometime in October,” came the pre-planned casual answer.

I’m a sequence and order person. I was a kid who separated the peas from the carrots. The ketchup goes next to the fries, not on the fries. No evergreens in the house until the last slab of Thanksgiving pie has disappeared. Just because I like order doesn’t mean I have issues.

Hold on, I see a dust ball on the floor next to the baseboard.

Neighbors flooded the front of their house with orange and green lights for Halloween nearly the entire month of October. The evening of Nov. 1, the house was awash in red and green. They must not have November in their calendars. (A phone upgrade can fix that.)

The battle to keep the holidays sensibly separated is like trying to sled uphill or assemble a snowman from the top down.

If you decorate before Thanksgiving, you forfeit the right to complain about the Little Drummer Boy’s “pa rum pum pum pum” played on endless repeat. Ditto for Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You.”

In addition to being a sequence and order person, I am also a realist. The battle is futile and I know it. Think I’ll go make a snow angel face down.

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