For the first eight years of my life, I lived in Australia, where I hear now Halloween is actually somewhat celebrated. In the early eighties however it was not, and my mother (Canadian by birth and transplanted by marriage) was dreadfully homesick for this North American holiday.
I remember clearly my mother trussing me and my sisters up for the end of October, though it made no sense to me as a little kid, I thought it was just another reason to play dress up, and I wasn't going to complain. My Mum even went around to the neighbors and asked that they have a couple of treats on hand for her kids so when we marched up their steps and bawled "Trick or treat!" at the tops of our lungs, there were freddos and caramello koalas to flop into our pillow cases.
It never really made sense to me though. My mother didn't insist on cooking a turkey at Thanksgiving, and she didn't seem to mind that it was hot at Christmastime, but Halloween she missed, and so she went to all this trouble to enjoy it with her bewildered offspring.
It wasn't until we moved to Canada in the early nineties that I understood the torch she carried for the holiday. We weren't wealthy by any stretch of the imagination, and we lived in the middle of nowhere-seriously, our bus ride to school was an hour each way; we were the last stop-but my Dad made a bunch of scarecrows, and we constructed costumes out of the dress up box and trick or treated down a street about a two miles away. Yes. We only trick or treated one street. Because we lived so far away from civilization, there were probably only a dozen or so kids who trick or treated in the area, and so the adults would give you a ridiculous amount of candy. After about eight houses, we'd barely be able to lift our bags.
These are some of my fondest halloween memories. Even though in Canada, you had to wear longjohns under your costume and there was the chance that the festivities might be cut short due to snow, I remember how some people decorated their houses so elaborately they felt like real haunted houses, with huge figures bent over steaming cauldrons, twinkling orange lights, flashing strobes, sticky spiderwebs, and speakers crackling with haunted house noises and random screams.
Around the second or third house, you'd become infected by the hysteria of the spookiness, and you'd start squealing and shrieking at every little thing, running down steps after collecting your candy, and tearing through shrubs and hedges cluttered with plastic caution tape convinced that there really was something chasing you.
I was thirteen when we moved to the states, and so I only trick or treated one halloween here (technically). At the age of fourteen, I declared myself too old and began helping my Dad with the scarecrows and in the guise of a kindly fortune teller or friendly witch, I dedicated myself to handing out the candy to the kids who braved our driveway.
No, I was never cool enough to go to an actual halloween party.
In fact, I didn't go to haunted houses, hayrides, or my first actual halloween party until college. Sadly, I didn't even know they existed because I had just assumed that once you were a teenager you put aside these childish things.
It's funny, when I think about my adolescence, I used to self impose all kinds of weird "rules" about growing up. Things I was supposed to give up or put away because I had outgrown them, that nobody would have minded, let alone noticed, if I'd kept my interest in.
As an adult, I have actually dedicated a lot of my time to recapturing those thrills of childhood and embracing the innocent joys of the holidays and the things I used to take pleasure in.
It's not an act of rebellion. I don't do it defiantly.
I do it because I think we talk ourselves out of joy almost constantly.
We laugh at people who are too excited or too involved in things as though they're missing some vital adult component, when in reality they're having a much better time than the person who disparages the fun as immature or juvenile.
One of the things I am thrilled about, as a parent, is sharing in the delights of the holidays with my babe. Especially this one.
My husband helped me lift the last vestiges of restraint I had about celebrating with abandon, and in the decade we have been together, I cannot think of a Halloween we have not marked with elaborate costumes, tons of treats and trickery, lots of decorations, candles, parades through graveyards, chicanery, and spooky tales traded with friends.
Leave aside the fact that we live in Salem, MA, the halloween capital of the Northeast.
It's impossible to ignore the magic of the season here.
And this year, I am very grateful for that because for the first time in a long time, my energy to enjoy this festival of creepiness is practically zilch.
I remember last year. Eight months pregnant, I dressed like a black widow and we handed out candy on a friend's porch right in the center of historic Salem. It was glorious. Afterwards, we walked the pitchblack backroads to another friend's costume party and drank punch and ate some bone cookies and I reminded myself that this would be so different when the baby came.
I have never been so right.
The last three weeks have been a miasma of teething and sleep regression.
In the last seven days, he has started his day at 3am on two occasions, 5am on three, and has yet to allow me to sleep through the night. That's right. At almost eleven months postpartum, I have yet to sleep more than three consecutive hours.
We are at the beginning of the fourth week of this nonsense, and I have been up since 4:30am.
My Beard has a costume for his work Halloween party and a different costume for handing out candy tonight. I didn't realize that I hadn't even thought of a costume for myself until yesterday.
This will be the first year I haven't dressed up for Halloween in memory.
I'm sure I could run down to CVS and grab a cheap make up palette and make myself into a sugar skull or a zombie or something, but as the babe has a habit of whacking me in the face and teething on my chin, make up doesn't seem like a wise idea.
I haven't carved a jack 'o lantern. I bought a bag of mini snickers last week and crushed it in three days while trying to nurse the babe back to sleep during the midnight screaming times.
I haven't been apple picking, hayriding, or haunted house traipsing. The closest I've come is the daily walks I take with the baby which I've been extending longer and longer so I can enjoy the various local cemeteries in all their autumnal splendor.
Tonight, I will swathe myself in black, cradle my babe in his bright red onesie with his devil horn hoodie, and help the Beard hand out candy on our spiderweb sticky porch.
Maybe I will watch Hocus Pocus in the midnight screaming times.
I will try really hard not to think about the halloweens past that were spectacular, and I will try not to think of the halloweens in the future when I am taking the babe trick or treating, or working with him on his costume, or baking treats for his class at school, because I look forward to all that weirdness. I really do.
I will try to enjoy sipping hot apple cider on the porch in the cold, moonless night, and remind myself that life is funny, and I could always be thousands of miles from my New England home in the city where I was born, where the world is exploding into a tropical spring, and Halloween is more devised to sell cocktails than a thrill you get in the pit of your stomach as you watch clouds move darkly past a church steeply and think perhaps you see something solid, something ragged and familiar, streaking through the fog.
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