I feel sorry for the hundreds of kids who can’t be out trick-or-treating in town center this year. But I feel just as sorry for me and my adult children. Halloween has always been tied with Christmas as our favorite holiday, and we each have our rituals.
For me, this means getting out the decorations—such as they are. We used to do something different each year—an opening coffin, eerie music, or horror images projected onto a hanging sheet. But now we’re pretty much down to “the girls.” The two of them have been with us for about 20 years, and they’re showing their age—one is missing an entire arm, the other’s wart dangles precariously, and their hair is definitely falling out. About 4 feet tall, with black pointy hats, striped legs, and black boots, their soft bodies can be placed in various positions and places. They have sat in the crabapple tree, hung off the picket fence, lounged on outdoor furniture, and leaned far out a second-floor window. They’re not scary and not even particularly interesting, but they’re part of tradition. As compensation, each year my son transforms a pumpkin into an illuminated, intricate work of art.
Living just off Little Common, we have been besieged by greater numbers each year; they swarm in from every direction—the path at the side of the house, the bank to the road, the granite steps from the driveway. Princess toddlers, pumpkin babies tucked in pouches, themed groups of gangsters or giggling fancy ladies, and always Frankensteins, witches, and ghosts. We love the homemade costumes and admire the creativity and collaboration behind them. Every year there are multiple versions of a hero or villain from the latest movie or an avatar or character in some video game, and I always have to ask my son to clue me in. A few years ago, I got the every fifth kid who was The Scream from Edvard Munch’s painting, but I never did recognize the 10 reappearances of Elsa that came the “Frozen” year. There’s always the top-heavy, vision-impaired youngster we worry about careening over the bank.
My son provides the fright on our end. A basically kind person, Halloween brings out a hidden part of him, and he delights in outdoing himself every year with a truly scary costume. I guess those years he spent with Stephen King should have given me a hint. He’s been an emerging werewolf, evil Mr. Pumpkinhead in a trench coat, Medusa with black hair full of snakes, and an immobile scarecrow with his mouth sewn closed. Whatever the costume—which is first worn to the faculty contest at the high school where he teaches—his younger sister, the makeup artist, arrives at 6:30 the morning of the event to apply the elaborate face paint and sometimes actually glue something to his skin. She returns again in the late afternoon for the touch-up before the evening appearance. Some kids, full of bravado, come up close to him, while others cower at the edge of the lawn. At least a few times a night he has to briefly reveal his true self to a distressed child and thereby forestall a nightmare.
For years I wore the same rubber mask—an ugly crone, complete with wrinkles and a wart on her pointy chin. But as I got to look more and more like the mask—though spared the wart, at least—I buried it at the bottom of the costume box. Now I’m just me and hope no one thinks it’s a mask.
Since the stream of kids is constant, we sit outside for the duration. We love to observe the different kinds of candy-takers. There’s the one who asks, “How many?” with their hand already thrust into the bowl. The one who pokes around and around in the bowl, paralyzed by indecision. Some waiting kid usually bursts out, “Just pick one, already!” There’s the indignant one who asks, “Don’t you have any Paydays?” and the one who gleefully announces, “Oh, yea, wow, thanks, York Peppermint Patty, my favorite.” And off course, before anyone gets a chance to say any of this, my son makes sure each visitor poses the traditional threat to us.
Every year we worry about running out of candy, even with the generous donations from townspeople distributed by the Police Department. If we start running low, I make a call to my daughter on the Common and see how her supply is. She has her own tradition up there in her Victorian house. She backlights silhouettes in every pane of the large front windows. Each year it’s something different—monsters, trees, ghosts, glowing eyeballs. (She’s never forgiven the person who proclaimed the spiders looked like ticks.) The dark house is eerily transformed, almost as though Cousin Itt might emerge and stumble through the gravestones in the front yard.
We’ll miss all these wonderful traditions this year. We’ll miss seeing the kids we know—and maybe haven’t seen since last Halloween—and their parents. We’ll miss the excitement in the air, the strange sounds in the dark, the laughter, the calling out to one another, the occasional unhappy wail.
The only thing I won’t miss is my traditional Halloween battle—take that first small Snickers and open the floodgates of a candy binge with its resultant guilt, or resist temptation and dream in frustration of the Baby Ruth that got away.
