I just love Halloween! Yes, this revelation may make you itch to throw daggers at this newspaper because you’re burning the midnight oil attaching the final touches to little Mimzy’s Halloween costume. But someday you’ll be in my shoes: that time of life when glue guns and frazzled nerves are a distant memory. But that day is not – HaHaHaHaHaHa! – today!
You’ve watched Martha Stewart until your eyes bled. Marvelous Martha, teasing us with anatomically correct jack-o-lanterns she carved with manicure scissors. “Illuminated Prom Queen” pumpkin boasts more teeth than Julia Roberts. “Alec ‘Daddy Dearest’ Baldwin” pumpkin features a micro-chip geared to spew potty-mouthed tantrums at 20-second intervals. “Senator ‘Wide Stance’ Craig” pumpkin sports oversized wingtips.
Yes, if Martha designed your kid’s costume, it would win an academy award. But it’s just you, dear friend, contending with the awesome duty of devising the perfect disguise for your kid, and that’s fine, because I’m going to share a secret with you about Halloween from a kid’s point of view.
I finally “get” Halloween, and it isn’t about costumes. As kids, we merely went through the motions during the day: dressing up, marching around the school, bobbing for apples. The pay-off came that one night a year when – for reasons a kid could never fathom – the same parents who would break their own legs to prevent us from eating candy – did an astounding about face and handed out gobs of it. For free! We didn’t even have to ask for it, much less beg. Well, unless you count the obligatory “Trick-or-treat,” which we more or less mumbled because we were conversing from the deep recesses of costumes, masks and mufflers so the actual words sounded more like, “Trkkkkmmphhrrrttt!”
When I was a kid there were fewer costumed heroes combating the Forces of Evil and nobody had even heard of Barbie yet. Nevertheless, when it came to Halloween costumes, we drove our poor mothers crazy. “I can’t be a princess this year,” I wailed. “I was a princess in first grade and it’s a sissy costume! Besides, you never let me buy a costume. Pleeeeeeeze buy me an Annie Oakley outfit from Woolworth’s this year!” My mom could sew like nobody’s business, producing beautiful Halloween costumes for me year after year. I would like to be able to go back in time and whomp myself up alongside the head for being such a brat, but we all know that isn’t going to happen. That’s why there’s karma.
Yes, I got paid back in spades arguing over costumes with my daughters who were under whelmed about going to school in a paper hospital gown that I’d astutely smuggled home after a visit to my OBGYN. “What’s wrong with going as a patient?” I begged shamelessly. “We can even slap on a couple of Band-Aids and go all out this year.”
Now the part that made trick-or-treating a challenge for kids like me who grew up in more frigid climates is that most Halloween nights were colder than heck. You could kiss your cute harem girl costume goodbye because when the sun went down your mother saw to it that you didn’t leave home in anything less than a mountain of polar bear skins. Thus evolved “day-” and “nighttime” costumes.
Nighttime costumes, for the sake of warmth, were pretty much whatever you could drag off your bed. We rounded up white sheets, cut out a couple of holes to see through and became the ghosts of Halloween. For the benefit of our mothers, beneath the bed linens we wore tons of clothes, rendering us into replicas of the ghost of the Michelin tire man. Most of us got stuck with earmuffs, too, but at least they helped hold the sheets in place so we could semi-see out of the eyeholes because if you ever spent much time in a bed sheet on Halloween, you know that the eyeholes you cut out never aligned with your actual eyes. Scary rubber masks over the sheets were optional; slapped over our faces, masks were a hazard that rendered us legally blind.
And so began the annual Halloween night parade of staggering, visually-impaired-pint-sized ghosts careening through the neighborhood because not only were we all blind as bats due to improper eyehole alignment and ill-fitting masks, our sheets were inevitably dragging the ground causing us to catch our permafrost-bitten feet in the hems, sending us reeling off in random directions.
The person in charge of herding us little kids along on our Halloween rounds was the obligatory big brother since our parents were at home sampling Mom’s “Witch’s Brew,” no doubt shoring up for the annual Sorting-Through-the Candy-in-Search-of-Sharp-Objects ritual. The big brother acted all cool and bored but you could tell he relished his important job. He’d inevitably finagle his mom into letting him dress up and take along a pillowcase to collect candy in return for his guardianship. This was a little shady because some of the brothers were of approximate shaving age and it got kind of embarrassing when he elbowed us out of his way at the door to get to the candy first.
Since our bed sheet cover-ups didn’t allow us to discern road hazards along the way, all those summers spent playing outside really paid off. We knew every pothole, ditch, big sidewalk crack, and deep storm drain in the neighborhood. Even the old dirt path containing huge, exposed tree roots that ran between a couple of our houses was committed to memory. We rarely took a spill and could have walked the neighborhood blindfolded, which in a sense was what we did.
Following the same route every year, we knew which houses handed out the good stuff and which ones handed out pennies. We relished the growing weight of our bags as the hour grew later. And although we didn’t see much through our misaligned eyeholes and droopy masks, in the end it really didn’t matter after all; the memories of Halloween night remain crystal clear.
