Seneca the Younger, Moral Epistle 18
“December is the month and the city is especially sweaty. Permission is given to public excess. Everything echoes with overwhelming preparation as of there were some difference between the Saturnalia and business as usual! So there is no difference and is seems to me that the man wasn’t wrong who said that December was once a month but is now a year.”
December est mensis; cum maxime civitas sudat. Ius luxuriae publicae datum est. Ingenti apparatu sonant omnia, tamquam quicquam inter Saturnalia intersit et dies rerum agendarum. Adeo nihil interest, ut non videatur mihi errasse, qui dixit olim mensem Decembrem fuisse, nunc annum.
I was reminded of this passage when I walked into the grocery store yesterday and witness a Halloween candy display in mid-July.
Halloween candy needs to age, and July is the perfect time to stock your Halloween candy cellar!
(Kidding aside, I love that that complaint is that old!)
Yes, I thought it was hysterical too. And best of all, that old fuddy duddy Seneca said it. If only Cicero said it too…
Doesn’t halloween candy come pre-aged?
I hear tell some buy it at a discount at the end of the season, freeze it, and then thaw it to give out to kids. Monstrous!
Also, I may have, independently of this, found my thoughts wandering to my Fall Horror Movie Binge (Fall sometimes=as early as the last two weeks of August for this) yesterday, so it’s pretty funny that you posted this.