Ohappy happy holidays, how gosh-darn much could I possibly love thee? Let me count the gay ol’ ways. Um, Jack-O-Lanterns! Overpriced candles in ribbons, smelling of baby bottoms and burnt Pine Sol! Bunchy-ass twinkle lights to squeeze all Mother Earth’s tree-beings into random strangled balls of spineless bush!

Even better: stupid twisted blue-icicle ones that never quite span the veranda! Nah, but I adore the stuff. I guess I just also have a thing for putting evil adjectives before all the wonderful ways we find to light the winter.

(And to all those who already sat through the last holiday column — a mid-October Christmas music vs. weird new Flaming Lips album inner conflict — sorry guys. I promise I’m not a Macy’s Day rep planted here to brainwash you out of your “corporate joy” conspiracy theories. I guess these 5 p.m. sunsets and crazy-cozy mist storms must have wriggled into all the holes I poked in my brain this Halloween weekend, forcing the e-tard in me to care exclusively about soft things and seasonal comforts. And just when I thought I was back on the road to cool. Brain podcast: pumpkin-spice ice cream! Eggnog latte! Tail of a bush bunny!)

There’s only one thing crappy about the big-red-bow gateway to the holidays we stand beneath this young November morn: Too soon, it will all be over. Life’s most indulgent months are like a long reckless weekend ahead, hung in gray dread of that schleppy, 21-unit January mud puddle waiting patiently in our certain failure of a future like the ugliest fucking Monday we ever saw.

For this reason, the earliest holidays are always the best. Well, Halloween is kind of just an autumn outsider to the lovey-dovey winter circle, but it’s got its own official colors and enough paraphernalia to take up two aisles in the Vons home-living department. And, more practically, lets us shake any last traces of summer shitshow before the curtain lifts for lovely snowflake pageant, lest they rear their ugly parts at the office Christmas party. (OK, fine, I just wish I went to office Christmas parties. Or had cousins under 30.)

So Halloween is only pregame, and Christmas/New Year’s are so far along in the season of silver bells they inevitably ring of the end. Which brings us to the fourth week of November: a night for ugly sweaters and savory forkfulls ’til our stomachs explode in gluttonous delight. Thanksgiving is the perfect middle man — the pinnacle of everything lovable about the holidays.

So why do the other h-days get all the songs? Halloween’s long ridden on “Thriller,” and no good man can deny himself a gangly romp to “Monster Mash.” Even that far-off February hour of love and gouda is tributed by Andre 3000’s delectably literal “Happy Valentine’s Day.” Maybe that’s it: All the great respected musical artists out there (yawn) can’t figure out a way to twist mashed potatoes into a swoony metaphor.

Little do they know, the greatest opportunity for immortalization is staring up from the pool of green-bean butter. However, if there’s one modern superstar fearless in the face of clunky, shallow details, it’s diva of my dreams Rufus Wainwright — the man for the job, I’m sure of it. Maybe it’s just my own fuzzy-wuzzy ties with Wainwright that jet-plane me back home every time I hear his monotone opera ringing in the rafters. But think about it: He’s a Starbucks tradition but also a sensitive we-didn’t-rape-and-pillage Canadian — to eliminate that little knot of guilt in our stomach where more grits should go — and a lover of all things superfluous. He chose to set his new live album, Milwaukee at Last!!!, in the midwest, and gave it three exclamation points to boot. He gives our sins a golden-boy glow and all the finest-silver glamour of a 1950s musical.

Plus, he’s got a full-leaf dinner-table of relatives to back him: Kate McGarrigle in her country skirts, and Daddy Loudon to bust out that charming “Rufus is a Tit Man” number for some fun-lovin’, down-home rosy cheeks in front of the new male friend. And Martha would surely lend a couple perfect verses on the grand marmalade mess that must be the age-old Wainwright cranberry sauce.

So I’ll spin Milwaukee this year, but eventually, Rufus, I want a real Thanksgiving album, and I want a line detailing Gammy’s fingers wriggling the grease and thyme up under some good-and-raw, fresh-plucked Turkey skin. Hell yes. Little Saint who?