Halloween Thoughts

If I lose my train of thought, I'm going to blame it on the trick or treaters. They're coming in hordes now. After about every thirty letters I write, I have to stop and answer the door...

I love it all, though. I love handing out candy to all the kids. I love hanging up bats and cobwebs. I love carving pumpkins. I've decided I love Halloween now as an adult more than I did as a kid. I see it this way: I still get all the candy I want (true, the downside is that I have to buy it, but on the upside I have no more bad trick-or-treating years) and I still get to dress up (this year I'm wearing a wicked-looking carnival mask). But now, I get to decorate the house however I want, and I get to stay up as late as I want watching spooky movies, and I get D-all-of-the-above in the comfort of my own home.

I remember as a kid I had certain pet peeves about Halloween, and I've decided to let my inner child vent, since I never really had the chance to vent when I was seven.

Childhood Halloween pet peeve number one? Adults who don't take the time to hang fake cobwebs properly. For some reason, this always bugged me as a kid. If you take the time to hang them the right way, they look amazing and spooky and fantastic. Hang them the wrong way and they look like Santa Claus walked past your house while he had a bad case of mange. Big tufts of white fluff fluttering wildly on porches and fences--just who are you trying to fool? Gee, some spider went spastic on your front porch. Oooo, I'm really scared. Come on. No self-respecting spider would ever weave a web like that for Halloween, and if he did, he'd probably kill himself for shame the next morning. But isn't that just like an adult? Too much in a hurry to take the time to string them up correctly so they look real, and then say "ah well, the kids won't notice." Yes. They will. Kids are particularly good judges of holiday decorating, and if they could, they'd probably vote you off the island, er, neighborhood. Especially if you give out lame candy. Which brings me to...

Childhood Halloween pet peeve number two. Lame candy. Anything with chocolate is the RIGHT candy to hand out on Halloween. There is one exception: chocolate and raisins. Whoever thought up that combination was smoking something. Anything with tootsie rolls? Yuck. Dum dums? Way too small, even for a kid. Jolly Ranchers? Eeh. Only the apple flavor. The other flavors? Bleh. As a kid I always wondered, do adults ever even eat candy? Because if they did, they would NEVER buy any of the above. It's just too cruel.

Childhood Halloween pet peeve number three. Boring costumes. My mother (love you mom!) never really put a lot of thought into our Halloween costumes. Once or twice she let me wear prepackaged costumes (I have a vague recollection of a Spanish Senorita costume one year) and once she made me a poodle skirt so I could be a '50s girl (you rock, mom!) but mostly her idea of Halloween costumes was finding an animal to make out of sweats and yarn. For several years in a row, I ended up being a black cat. Black sweat pants, black sweat shirt. Yarn tail. Black ears bought at a costume store. And as practical as that was--yes it kept me warm and yes it was financially sensible--I didn't really enjoy wearing it. Why?

IT WAS BORING.

A few minutes ago, a girl at the door said to me, "I remember your house. I remember you from last year." And I told her, "I remember you too. You were on the road." And then she got that oh-yes-I-remember-and-do-you-remember-that-too look in her eyes, because she must have realized I was referring not to Halloween of last year, but to the day after, when she was riding her bike down my street, and I was in my garden, and she waved at me and I waved back, and then she told me with her smile that she liked what I'd done for Halloween the night before. Really, it's a lesson I wish more parents would keep in mind--

Kids remember when you invest time in them.

Even if it does mean taking forty minutes to hang cobwebs the right way, when normally you would have done it in five. And if a few black paper bats hanging from the porch roof say "you're important to me" in their own unique construction paper way, imagine how much more impact the actual words carry.

My cats aren't so thrilled about all the loud music (I'm playing the theme to the Haunted Mansion ride at Disneyland) and all the knocking and all the weird small people on my porch. My cat Boo is hiding under my desk (right by my feet) and Taylor has buried herself somewhere deep within the underworld beneath my bed. I hope she is at least kind enough to kill a few spiders while she's down there.

I started with 199 pieces of candy. I now have 102 pieces left. That's what, 97 kids so far? A lot of slasher masks and witches and princesses. One boy dressed as Tigger (who was a little too old to be Tigger, really...) two boys dressed as Simpson characters. One dad wearing a bright red witch hat who was trick or treating for his hospitalized daughter. Several infants dressed as teddy bears, several superheroes (mostly batman). One Dorothy, one Red Riding Hood. Five trick or treaters got their various assortment of wings (bug, fairy, angel, and unclassified) tangled in the fake cobwebs (hey, what can I say, that stuff is tricky) and one boy wore a green hat that was so enormous he got caught in the spooky ripped up sheet I have hanging at the front of the porch. No ghosts this year so far...unless I count the 8-year-old boy who was dressed as Michael Jackson. Seriously, should that count as the King of Pop himself, or should that fall into the ghost category? Probably both.

Make that 105 kids happily served so far. Wait... 107. One girl on my porch just told me, "You have a really spooky house here." "Thank you," I said. "I tried." (Ain't that the truth!) and then a boy/vampire said, "Whatever you do, don't go to that house over there. It's really scary. They have a fog machine and a werewolf...I was attacked by a werewolf..." He clambered down my stairs while staring vaguely in a direction across the street.

Happy Halloween!