There is a season

For everything there is a season.

The end of financial year* - celebrated with newly coined atrocity "Happy EOFYS" - starts in May with the acronymically mentioned end of financial year sales and ends sometime after March the year following when the tax office starts to send mildly impolite letters to rich people that haven't yet paid the distressingly modest amount of tax they have been assessed as owing; if it's not too much trouble.

Father's Day follows fairly rapidly as the joy of new car ownership - at runout prices - starts to fade and tis the season to bring out socks, mildly amusing t-shirts, stubby coolers, and endless amounts of hardware because there's nothing your father would rather do than spend his weekend fixing stuff while looking longingly at the beer cooler and wishing that there was something in it rather earlier than 7pm - after we've gotten all the kids bathed and in bed.

There used to be a tragic lull here but research marketeers have discovered a new season witch is Halloween. It's a bit of a dwarf-planet of a season still here in Australia but as the need of our children to pronounce 'tomato' to rhyme with 'potato' and eat cookies takes stronger hold, I think that this new starter will mature and fill the gap nicely between Father's Day and Christmas and ensure that there is no real opportunity to put stores of cash away responsibly for the oncoming season of cost and credit card spending.

Christmas, as is well known kicks off in September and finishes in late December just in time for the advent of Back to School which, starting some five weeks before actual classes, is designed to ruin the holidays of children everywhere while slowly building the anticipation of relief for parents to such a pitch of intensity that it's a wonder teachers aren't called up for National Service - at double time and a half - four weeks into their holidays by parents who are more than happy to foot the bill.

Long before school is back and the national blood pressure goes down by a few points, two overlapping seasons are in with Valentine's Day cards and $25,000 diamond rings - the only way to show you really love her - competing for catalogue and shelf real estate with bunnies, eggs, hens, Humpty Dumpty, otherwise unshaped chocolate that was in special Christmas gift box not three months ago now repackaged with a suspiciously relieved looking rabbit on it - and bloody hot cross buns.

BTW - why is the expensive stuff only for 'her' on Valentine's Day? Show your man you really love him with $25,000 worth of ocean going yacht. Put a ribbon and a heart shaped card on it if you must. There's more fun to be had on the deck of a sloop than you're going to get from sparkly carbon cut into peculiar geometric shapes.

In any event, as Easter slowly fades onto the discount shelves, Mother's Day is icumen in, which is a chance to trot out the pink, the ribbons and the ludicrously expensive bling for another outing. At this point, you can indicate your level of love from "early courting" @ $25K, "early marriage" at a house-deposit wary $5K or a "we've got three kids now" at $5 a go at the school Mother's Day stall.

Which brings us very nicely around the great cycle of the seasons to EOFYS again.

The only season that isn't a real season is Anzac Day. It is quite OK to turn the birth and brutal torture and death of God himself into heavily commercialised circuses in the calendar but the pointless and tragic death of mere mortals is far more sacred and any mention of the word Anzac on anything other than biscuit packets is, prime facie, sedition - punishable by immediate ostracism with an extraordinarily sharp ostrace.

*The Australian financial year runs from 1 July to 30 June.