Happy Pumpkin Day
I spent this week visiting our San Francisco and LA offices, finishing up this year’s round of Firm meetings. We started them at the end of September in New England and Florida; last week it was Philadelphia and the New York metro region; and this week it was the West Coast. All in all, we connected with almost everyone who works at Marcum. As in the past, our State of the Firm meetings are a big success. It’s always amazing to me how much our people crave and enjoy the firmwide information we share with them. People really want to connect with the senior leadership of our Firm, and we’ve successfully created a forum to accomplish that. The bump in morale, no matter how short- or long-lived it turns out to be, is certainly well worth the effort. It’s really very gratifying.
Thank goodness I got home in time for Halloween. Elsa (Lily, 5), Anna (Kate, 3) and Olaf (Max, 2) were looking forward to Daddy being home from his work trip to go trick-or-treating with the Frozen cast of characters after school. I wouldn’t miss it for the world – not even for the State of the Firm. As you know, we live in New York City, so we do Halloween NY style. We’ll start out going to 78th Street between Park and Lexington Avenues, where the many townhouses are done up in true haunted house spirit. We’ll then trick-or-treat up and down Park Avenue, where the apartment buildings that line each side welcome all the little gremlins and goblins like they do in single family houses in the suburbs.
The origins of Halloween are in the Celtic festival known as Samhain, which was a celebration of the end of the harvest season in Gaelic culture. The ancient Gaels believed that on October 31 the boundaries between the worlds of the living and the dead overlapped and the deceased would come back to life and wreak havoc. One can only imagine. Traditional activities on Halloween (shortened from All Hallows’ Evening) include trick-or-treating, bonfires, costume parties and haunted houses. The festivities spread to North America in the 19th century, courtesy of Irish and Scottish immigrants.
The trick part of trick-or-treat is a threat of mischief to any homeowner if a treat is not forthcoming. Trick-or-treaters visiting my house have nothing to worry about. I already have enough mischief in my life. There’ll be plenty of candy to go around for everyone.
Happy Halloween!
