The killing frost came last night. The ground is carpeted in gold, the trees are beginning to look skeletal. ‘Tis the season of ghouls and ghosts, jesters and jack-o’-lanterns.
I sort of hate Halloween. I know it’s fun for the kids, and I love the season. The holiday, not so much. I’m not fond of a lot of things that seem to make people happy: fairs, clowns, circuses, carnivals, zoos. They suggest excess and madness, a human striving to control the impossible. Funnel cakes aside.
I enjoyed those things as a child, but they reeked of something slightly off, even to my child’s nose. The cheer was forced, the animals dead-eyed. Toilet paper streamers and razor bladed apples. Old clowns reeling in playgrounds, like drunk Santas. Horror and ghosts, manufactured fear. I’m already afraid, thank you very much.
Perhaps I’m overthinking.
The only Halloween costume I clearly — and fondly — remember wearing was the pioneer girl, handmade by a forgotten relative, complete with calico bonnet and lace-edged apron. Why this is my favorite Halloween memory is one for the head doctors; Little House on the Prairie is decidedly not an aspirational look. I don’t know what happened to that outfit. There must be a place where Halloween costumes go to die. The island of misfit memories.
Halloween is dread to the parent who loathes shopping and can’t sew. My only sewing project was a clown costume made before my inner cynic won. A pattern, a tiered collar, rickrack, elastic, hook-and-eye — it took months and sent me to a crazy place. Every child wore it, though, and it still hangs in a closet somewhere in my house. I’m a little proud of it.
I hate clowns.
Each of my kids embraced Halloween in a signature, ravenous way. The oldest was meticulous in his costume design — ripping, painting, and building in pursuit of frightful disguise. The second son was very serious about his evolving Ninja persona. My third son was initially dumbfounded by the ritual. Naked was his natural state, naked outdoors preferable. Naked in a tree, optimal. Might naked with a cape work? Can a large stick brandished with intensity constitute the entirety of one’s costume? My daughter, the baby, swung from princess to punk, punctuated by witches, fairies, and zombies. Whatever it took to get the candy.
A writer once told me, “Halloween is an excuse for young girls to get in touch with their inner tarts.” He loves Halloween.
Halloween candy is a racket. The market can’t resist a flock of ready-made seasonal consumers, and so we have holiday themed, bite-sized morsels that you can conveniently purchase with your carving kit and spooktacular decor. How many of us buy giant bags of individually wrapped sugar bombs, knowing we will furtively gobble them alone in the dark November kitchen?
To the child mind, candy is the point: the collection and ingestion of as much mass-produced, corn syrup crammed, chemically colored confection as possible. I spent a lifetime tending their health, teaching them to brush, feeding them the good stuff, only to have it blown to hell in one evening of forced acquisition. It’s the child’s version of a stick-up — TRICK OR TREAT — gimme the goods or I go mad up on your porch.
An early Halloween for one of my kids fell in the wake of a pulpotomy. For the uninitiated, that’s a baby root canal. Baby Ruth is not indicated.
I have a friend, an artist, who takes raucous glee in the rituals of Halloween. Once, he and Steven took the kids out in a white van for a commando style trick-or-treat. Cruising the best streets (those with pumpkins on porches, skeletons in chairs, and fake cobwebs in bushes), he would pull to the curb, throw open the van doors and yell GO!GO!GO! My angels charged across clipped lawns, past jack-o’-lanterns and weaker children, like tiny beasts bent on one thing — more. The MOST, the one haul to rule them all.
I stayed home and made soup, praying that the scars were superficial.
It was a Brazilian black bean soup that probably wasn’t Brazilian at all, but that’s what the recipe said. It was elaborate and hearty and, with a homemade bread, was intended to warm the bellies of the beasts after a hard night of search and destroy. When I put the prepared soup in the blender, the lid flew off and spewed partially puréed black bean soup all over my walls, my ceiling, and me. It was as if the devil himself had projectile vomited in my kitchen. They found me in a state of dramatic disarray, cursing Halloween.
I think the dead must hate Halloween. All the giddy costumed people moaning around the graveyards, not a flower or a tear, just a lot of ghoulish lurching about. And what’s with the skeletons? I keep one of those under my skin, and try very hard not to think about it.
Halloween is a festival of mixed messages, a bunch of lies to hoodwink the young. Don’t take candy from strangers — unless you wear a costume, have a bag, and go directly to their door. Don’t bother the neighbors, except today when you can take their candy. Dress like a civilized person, except today when you can dress like an intergalactic pirate with a weapon.
My kids remember houses with the rule no costume, no candy. My husband grew up in Manhattan and remembers grown men banging on the apartment door, no costume, basso profundo TRICK OR TREAT. They got candy. The rules are malleable.
Pumpkins are pretty for a minute but then fall into themselves like science projects, dark festering wounds on the porch. Jack-o’-lanterns send you to the floor or the emergency room. Or both.
Costumes are for theater folk and people who very much want to be looked at. I like to look but don’t look at me. The best adult costume I’ve been able to manage is a mask. Me in a mask. Anonymity is delicious.
I once went to a Halloween party dressed as my best self and left with a husband. It’s a good, long story, but maybe best told like that.
The kids are grown now and I live in an isolated place. The peace is a welcome reward. Happy Halloween. Save the dark chocolate for me. I’m going to make soup.
I loved this. Halloween is, indeed "dread to the parent who loathes shopping and can't sew." As one who has had to run into K-Mart five minutes before closing on Oct 30th way too many times, I fully appreciate your eloquent dislike for this most demanding of holidays. Thank you for saying boo to Halloween and making me laugh.
Loved this - thank you