Halloween Cometh

You can’t come back to a home unless it was a home you went away from. Carl Sandburg

I looked out the window and saw the lighted pumpkin jack-o-lantern on the porch across the street. It is a very nice decoration; it is perfect in every way.

That’s because it’s store-bought, and before you think I’m poking fun at it or the neighbors, be assured I am not. It is quite tasteful and exquisite. I just found myself reminiscing as I stared at it across the way of how much life has changed over the past number of decades.

You’ll be reading this on or about Halloween and, I must confess, that is and always has been amongst my favorite holidays of the year. It isn’t just the treats (although my sweet-tooth has never been sweeter than it is now) or the costumed hooligans running wild on their sugar-highs, but the complete lack of expectations the day holds.

Families don’t gather to feast, watch football, and argue politics. Banks and government offices remain open for business, and we pop in to do what needs doing without fretting over people “missing out” on the holidays. Kids of all ages go door to door begging (and playfully threatening mayhem) and we feign surprise, delight, or fear as we dole out the store-bought treats (because what you could catch if you ate from many of our home kitchens is truly frightful!).

The kids stroll around, many in store-bought costumes (and I’m not putting that down), but it causes me to stop and wonder: are families so strapped for time they can’t make their own costumes? If they are, that is a sad state of affairs.

Looking through old family photos I hadn’t seen in years (after my Dad’s passing), I saw the picture of my brother in his steel-gray robot costume, fashioned out of cardboard boxes cut and spray painted and hung together with duct tape. I was dressed as a swash-buckling pirate; my dad’s hat pinned into a tri-corner pirate’s hat, and my sister’s white blouse with ruffles down the front helped me look ever-so-much like Errol Flynn or Tyrone Power. The grease-painted beard helped a lot! My sisters were a fairy godmother and a royal princess (Cinderella, perhaps).

When our own kids were growing up, we made every effort to craft costumes at home, but I know there was some transitioning to store-bought options. Our daughter loved being a pumpkin and, frankly, trying to craft a pumpkin or jack-o-lantern by hand wasn’t in our household skill-set.

Still, it was fun putting costumes together and then, at dark, walking the neighborhood with our kids and listening to the shouts of glee and terror; we had one neighbor who loved sitting still on his front porch, dressed as a scare-crow, and suddenly jumping to his feet at just the last moment putting both kids and parents into immediate cardiac arrest!

Sadly, Halloween seems to be going the way of all good things. It is still a week away as I write this, and schmaltzy Christmas movies have begun their run on the cable channels. Big box stores have had their Christmas displays up for a month (at least), and the news is “reporting” that Christmas specials and sales have begun and warning consumers that if they don’t grab their stuff now, it may be (gasp) too late, later!!!

Those things are outside my control, of course. One cannot direct the rising of the sun or hold back the tides or return the world’s ills and pestilences to Pandora and her infamous Box. No amount of weeping or wailing will restore the world to a golden age which (if we’re completely honest) never truly existed in the first place.

What we CAN do, however, is carve out space and time in our lives to remember the past with thanksgiving, and see how it might shape us here and now, today. The candy, costumes, and decorations are nothing more than props and set-pieces. What counts is taking time with those we love and crafting stories we’ll tell for tomorrow.

The pumpkin across the street is made of plastic, of course, but the memories it stirs are real. The ghosts and goblins contain the hearts of children, so I’ll embrace them forever in this, our cobwebbed valley.