November is a very strange month.

It has the reputation as the “Month of Thanks,” and yet the only appreciation I see anywhere this month is for facial hair. Apart from Thanksgiving, November also includes such classic celebrations as No-Shave November, National Novel Writing Month and hating on the premature commercialization of Christmas.

If Facebook is any indication, many (aka all) of my friends participate in at least one of these festivities, so I’m prepared to explain why I, personally, refuse to celebrate these “holidays.”

First off, No-Shave November is an excuse for men to reclaim their masculinity by growing fur on their face. For some reason, a man is not a man until he has a giant hair-bush growing on the bottom-half of his head. While some men have been defined by their beards (Redbeard, Blackbeard, Bluebeard, Chuck Norris, etc), it’s not necessarily the affirmation of testosterone that people play it up to be.

See, No-Shave November started as something for charity, promoting awareness of prostate cancer. If you have yet to find the connections between growing a beard and fighting cancer, don’t worry — I’m still putting the pieces together myself.

And really, you can’t expect me to believe that all (aka any) GVSU students abstain from shaving to help fight cancer. If it did, I would totally be on board with my disgusting patchiness that I occasionally call a beard. Until then, I’ll just stick to writing.

Though, when I say “writing,” I don’t mean novels. For many people in, or associated with, the writing major, National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo) is a huge commitment (or BFD). The point of NaNoWriMo is to begin writing a 50,000-word novel on Nov. 1 (no cheating) and finish it before Dec. 1.

The 50,000-word limit might seem daunting to most people who would much rather expand the page margins and increase the font size of periods instead of adding two more sentences to a two-page paper. Breaking it down, though, it averages to about 1,667 words a day, or three of my columns. See, as a writing major, I enjoy putting words on the page, but that does not mean that I am looking for more excuses to do it.

When people ask me if I’m going to be a novelist when I graduate (apparently because that’s all anyone has ever written, ever), I always respond with the same response: “I don’t have the attention span for something like that.” I know myself and I know that I can barely keep focused writing 1,000 words of editorial a week, let alone academic papers and tweets.

So, no, I don’t need an excuse to spend 31 days on the same characters and plot. I’ll get to it when I get to it.

Holiday shopping, on the other hand, doesn’t work that way. So hop on the bandwagon and stop complaining about Christmas ads before Thanksgiving. Were you expecting commercials with dancing turkeys and a man made out of stuffing?

Hmmm, note to self: expand on stuffing-man character. See if I can turn that into a series…

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