At 5:18 on the morning of Nov. 14, PhillyBurbs.com proclaimed, “The holiday season is here.” 

On Thanksgiving Day, PhillyVoice laid down the gauntlet. “Once the Thanksgiving meal is done, it’s game over for the last holdouts; you’re in the yuletide whether you like it or not.” 

I love the sentiment. And the solid use of a semicolon. 

Christmastime begins Nov. 1. For years, I have wielded this sword of merriment with an army at my back.  

My daughter, whom we call Buddy the Elf for her perpetual cheer and gobbling of life, embraced my lengthy holiday celebrations like Spanish moss embraces the trees on her Floridian campus. 

My son joined our holiday ride like a shared Uber. But he’s a teenager now. And in the battle for his holiday disposition, my husband has won.  

Yes. My Ebenezer Scrooge before the ghosts, George Bailey before Clarence of a husband has lured our son into his way of thinking. 

Now, I love my husband’s curmudgeon sensibilities. He was born an old man and that grumpiness is, to quote Robert Palmer, simply irresistible. 

But I have long said the universe had a little fun with me the day I pledged my life to him. 

My husband, that is. Not Robert Palmer. 

See, my husband, his dad, and my son all share a name.  

And temperament.  

It’s like the universe said, “You like him? Well, let’s see how you deal with him in triplicate!” 

Most days, I’m in on the joke. There’s nothing funnier than when a commercial advertises Sean Mendes on the next Live! and my husband sighs impatiently, “Who’s Sean Mendes?” 

And then, later, when that same commercial runs, and my son says, “Who’s Sean Mendes?” — having no idea his father said the same thing, the same way just an hour before. 

And then, when I’m relaying to my father-in-law my husband and son’s shared, mysterious annoyance about a singer they don’t know being on a show they don’t watch, my father-in-law grouses, “Wait. Who’s Sean Mendes?” 

When that happens, I want to shroud them in a four-way hug, and smother them with kisses, and tell them their surliness is just about the most lovable thing in the world. 

But they don’t hug each other, much less alongside me like a human shamrock.  

And it’s moments like that, when they outnumber me, I think maybe the universe isn’t so funny. 

When I declared Christmastime’s arrival in November, my son asserted Christmastime is confined to the eve and the day. 

When I asked my husband if he had any ideas for his annual Christmas Day cocktail concoction, he said, “I’m working.” 

So, I was surprised when my grouches were all in on cutting down a Christmas tree at the Christmas tree farm near our cabin Thanksgiving weekend. 

In fact, my husband suggested it. 

Even more shocking, my son asked to decorate it on Dec. 1. 

Gleeful, I pulled the decorations from storage. I popped cookies in the oven. I shuffled my Christmas playlist. 

“No Christmas music,” my son said. “It’s not Christmastime.” 

You know, there’s a movie from the 1980s. Just One of the Guys. In it, a teen girl marvels over her adolescent brother’s phone call with their mom. “Hey, yo, scumbag,” the brother says. “Same to you, buttface,” he says later, hanging up the phone. 

This is the relationship I have with my son. 

I love it. 

Because when he says ridiculous things like “no Christmas music” as if that’s even possible when decorating a Christmas tree, I can say, “Shut it, dingus.” 

After one strand of garland — one — my guys appraised the tree as having no more room. 

No more room. For garland. Like we’re hanging anvils from the tree. Like garland isn’t malleable and feather-light. 

“We never,” my husband said, “should have done Santa with the kids. Santa as a construct conveys to disadvantaged children they are bad because they wake up to no presents from Santa Claus.” 

Which is true. And kind. But with our kids at sixteen and nineteen years old, that jig has long since been up. Why broach it while stringing lights, while Andy Williams is mistletoeing, while gooey cookies await? 

Why broach it at all?  

What, am I supposed to Superman this thing? Fly around the world to turn back time a là Christopher Reeve? Undo the Santa mythos with our kids? 

Undeterred, I hung our ornaments. Each tells a story.  

Here’s the golden orb gifted us by the departed mom of dear friends. Here are pictures of our children in handmade frames. Here’s the Star of David our daughter adorably, curiously fashioned as a preschooler.  

“We’ll never fit all the ornaments,” my husband and son grumbled.  

Um, what? 

I’m sorry. Which ornaments, exactly, are we shoving back into storage?  

The one of our infant daughter on her first Christmas? Or maybe the blue one our son made, his picture glued to the center by sticky preschooler hands? Ah, I know. The one Indy gingerly labeled and gifted to me, before he went to Marion’s bar in Nepal? 

At Christmastime. 

Yeah. If anyone has the right to be a Christmas grump, it’s me. But these two. Jeez. It was like decorating with Mr. Potter from It’s a Wonderful Life and Mrs. Deagle from Gremlins.  

Did you two want to, I don’t know, threaten our dog with the spin dryer? Hide Uncle Billy’s deposit in your newspaper? 

“You two,” I groaned, “are such Grinches!”  

I was outnumbered. With Buddy the Elf high in the sky, flying back to Florida, I had no one. No one to share my Christmas cheer. 

Or, you know, force it down everyone’s throat. 

So I have just one thing left to do. 

Phillyburbs.com. PhillyVoice. Come live with me. Just for Christmastime. 

It starts Nov. 1.

Right?