Vivien Jackson | A Primer to Celebrating Autumn...in Texas

When I was a kid, my mother was paranoid. I mean, she's still paranoid—she's an
expert in everyday items that will definitely kill me soon—but her hovering and
persistent worry provided the clearest shape to my sense of How One Properly
Celebrates Fall.

Apparently once there was a dude who either poisoned Halloween candies or
slipped razor blades into caramel apples or…I dunno what the real story was, but
by the time Mom got done with it, pretty much every kid on the planet who dared
go trick-or-treating was begging for a gruesome death. No way was I getting out
of the house in my bed-sheet-and-eyeliner Cleopatra costume.

So, since blackmailing my neighbors for candy was out and I was personally unchurched (read: the only heathen in a very Catholic neighborhood), my options for seasonal festivities were kind of limited. I could always have gone deer hunting with my dad and brother, but Bambi was still far too raw and relevant in my psyche (still is). Which left really only one thing.

Football.

In the late 70s and early 80s, football in Houston meant the Oilers. All the
walls in my house were painted Columbia blue. Pictures exist of
pre-gradeschool-me sitting on the laps of Earl Campbell and Mike Renfro. I
remember practicing Billy "White Shoes" Johnson's end-zone dance in the bathroom
mirror. This kid was hard-core.

My family scored tickets to a couple of games in the Astrodome by virtue of my
sister's high school band talent, but most games we watched on the grainy and
ginormous TV-that-was-also-a-major-piece-of-furniture in the living room. On
Sundays, we gathered reverently to curse the Pittsburgh Steelers, say Amen, and
yell our fool heads off. My demure white-haired granny, a steel magnolia
originally from Angelina County, taught me a whole new lexicon of juicy swear
words on game days.

Later on, when I met the man I was gonna marry, it was important that he hate
the Dallas Cowboys with a pure and just loathing. He did. We wed. We celebrated
our 24th anniversary this last August. These days, we honor the season of pretty
autumn colors and pumpkin-flavored-everything by dressing weekly in burnt orange
(University of Texas is my alma mater, and also Earl Campbell's, which is purely
coincidence) and hollering until our voices go and the stomp of 100,000 of our
closest friends makes the stadium's upper deck quake.

Because that's how we celebrate Fall in Texas. Yeehaw and get-that-ball.