Colloween starts Sunday

As anyone who knows me probably realizes, I love birthdays -- mine in particular, but I'm all for celebrating everyone else's, too.

I guess it's my inner 8 year old. Christmas is a great season, and Halloween can be fun, but there's something especially good about a holiday that you don't have to share. If someone wishes you Happy New Year, the polite response is something like "You, too." When someone wishes you a happy birthday, your only obligation is to smile and say thank you. It's just yours.

Sure, I share my birthday with Jerry Lewis and Erik Estrada so for them, I'll make an exception. If Ponch wishes me a happy birthday, I'll pull down my sunglasses, hike up my boots and say, "You, too."

A few years back, I somewhat inadvertantly launched a tradition called Johnukkah. I'd been crazy busy with school and wanted to make sure he didn't think I took him for granted, so I gave him little gifts for the seven days leading up to his birthday. He not only took to the idea enough that it became an annual thing, but his friends started wishing him happy Johnukkah. In fact, somewhere out in cyberspace is a Johnukkah web site Jack built after John's 40th birthday.

In the natural evolution of such a perfectly indulgent idea, of course I needed my own named birthday festival. I'd already informed John when our relationship was very young that I expected a very big fuss to be made about my birthday -- hey, you don't ask, you don't get -- so this was just attaching a name to my previously declared demands.

Friends tried a few options, but I think it was Parker who finally landed on Colloween. It doesn't have the natural implication of a several-day observance like Johnukkah, but how many options are there? Collolent? The 12 Days of Col-mass?

Today's mail brought my first birthday gift: an outstanding leopard-print flask from Katie. It's just the thing for the fashionable girl who wants to smuggle hooch into an overpriced Manhattan lounge.

Lara informed me recently that if I get a package from Vintage Lucy's, "it may or may not be
from Rob and me." Lara's the perfect mix of fashionable and hilarious, so I may knock our crabby old mail lady down to snatch that package from her hands. The suspense is killing me.

Colloween officially starts tomorrow. This means that through executive fiat I can just declare my every desire and John is honor bound to provide. If I want coffee in bed, then brunch at someplace swanky, that's my prerogative. Or I might feel like hanging around all day at home and having John cook me dinner. Or maybe I'll just want a big piece of banana cake from Billy's.

On my actual birthday, we're going to Carnegie Hall for Marvin Hamlisch conducting the New York Pops. (I remember digging him on The Great Space Coaster as a kid.) We'll probably get dinner before, but it's tough to squeeze in much between when I get off work and the start of the show. Could be a cart knish on the street. And you know what? I love those, too.