JACKSON, Miss. (WJTV) – We’re in October now, and the year is clipping past.

It’s been a long time since January and New Year’s. We’ve had holidays drift by up until now. As prominent as those holidays are, they just leave ripples in time as they float by.

But the Mississippi State Fair is when the year picks up steam again. Some years, you see it coming and wait in anticipation of the roasted corn and anything imaginable deep fried and maybe served on a bun. Other years were already into the second week of the fair before you realize it’s even time for it again.

Now, the State Fair is a stand-alone event, for sure. There is nothing else like it. Rides and concerts and the lights and the noise and smells of all that cooking drifting over downtown. But it is also the first of a series of events that will hit in short order. So, I take the opportunity the fair presents to warn you that, like falling dominoes, in no time, Halloween hits. It’s so close on the heels of fair that you probably need to already have the pumpkin on the porch and the ghosts hanging in the trees by now.

After Halloween, you’ll hardly have time to clean up the scarecrows before you have to decorate for Thanksgiving. In preparation time, Thanksgiving comes only nano-seconds behind Halloween, it seems. 

And as all of us know, we need to already be shopping for Christmas by the time Thanksgiving gets here or we’ll be late. Only, rarely am I ever doing so. 

But the State Fair is the wake-up alarm that the end of the year with all of its other stuff is upon us. Not time to start panicking, but to start enjoying. Enjoying fall with its mild days and chilly mornings. Maybe even rain again!