April may be the cruellest month, but autumn is the most overrated season. If you live in the US where “fall” has become something of a religion, this may seem a shocking thing to say. I’m not sure exactly when it happened, but fall has been commercialised to an extent I don’t think any other season has. People looooove talking about how much they love fall: how they adore apple-picking and leaf-peeping and pumpkin patches. The season even has its own influencers; just Google “Christian Girl Autumn”.
To be clear, while it may be overrated, I’m not saying autumn is entirely awful (though spring is obviously better). The leaves turning different colours are pretty, I’ll happily admit that. I’m not dead inside. You know what is dead inside, though? Those leaves. The trees don’t want them so they kick them off and they rot on the floor and turn into a soggy mess that harbours mould and releases spores that give me allergies. Even if I was the sort of person who enjoyed posting photos of myself frolicking in the autumnal foliage on Instagram, I couldn’t because my allergies wouldn’t let me.
Forget my allergies, though – let’s talk about apple-picking. I raise my hat to the genius who decided to rebrand manual labour as a fun seasonal activity people pay stupid amounts of money to do. Maybe we could extend that strategy to other things and turn street-cleaning into the next it activity.
Pumpkins are another overrated aspect of autumn. I’ve got nothing against pumpkins but you can have too much of a good thing, and I think we can all admit the world has had way too much pumpkin spice. There are pumpkin spice lattes, pumpkin spice candles, pumpkin spice ramen, pumpkin spice lip balm etc etc etc. Maybe it’s time for another squash variety to have its moment in the sun, eh? I’m rooting for the humble courgette myself. Courgette spice lattes all around!
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
