In what feels like a tradition that arrives earlier and earlier each year, seasonal Saturnalia decorations have already begun to spring up all over Seattle.
“Look, I love to celebrate the Roman deity Saturn as much as the next guy, but can you at least wait until the Feast of the Holy Innocents before you put up the damn wool bindings on the feet of the eight-foot Saturn statue on your lawn?” said Rick Goldberg, resident of the Grassy Endings Country Club. “Every year the Saturnalia celebrations are pushed further back into our minor harvest holidays, which I might add, some of us still enjoy very much. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t want to see or hear an ‘Io Saturnalia’ until after Thanksgiving weekend.”
While some in the neighborhood found umbrage with their neighbor’s premature decorations, citing that they didn’t even wait until the Saturnalicus Princeps was anointed to lead the ceremony, others defended their personal right to celebrate their Pagan holidays on their own terms.
“Look, I pay my HOA dues like everyone else and I’ll be damned if Rick is going to tell me when and where I can sacrifice my suckling pig as I string it upside down and let its thick blood flow into my six-foot clay cistern on my lawn,” said Todd Phelps, Goldberg’s neighbor and early Saturnalia decorator. “I already painted my blood vessel that gauche beige color the board insists on, so if I want to dip the feet of our yearling children into the warm blood of the pale hog just after Samhain has waned, that’s my goddamn right.”
Goldberg later expressed concern that the newly popular Orgy of Superfluous Material Consumption was also beginning to interrupt proceedings for the traditional Orgy of Abundant Nutriment Consumption.
