Mr. Marengo’s Marathon

The season of fall holidays in New York, always fine, has become still finer in recent years with the ever-firmer addition of Marathon Sunday to the rest of the lovely unfolding that begins with Labor Day and the final rounds of the U.S. Open, runs through Jewish New Year and then on to Halloween, Thanksgiving, and the impossibly long ramp-up to a New York Christmas. (Can those be Christmas trees in the windows in the second week of November? Yes.) When Marathon Sunday overlaps with Halloween, as it did this year, it adds an extra dose of beauty to the whole. Our fall feasts alternate those that celebrate renewal and continuity with those that celebrate the (temporary) reversal of things—the world turned upside down, kids abstaining from playing tricks on grownups, at a price. We pay for the autumn by the bleak gray and mostly holiday-empty February and March, until St. Patrick’s Day, bleak and boozy but bright, rolls around.