Halloween, the holiday I love to hate, is looming. But just because I whine about it
doesn’t mean I don’t celebrate it. I
do. Nearly every year I dress for the
occasion in my witch’s outfit of comfy lounge pants, sweater and footies and
cackle all the way from the dark and gloomy first floor of the house down to
the basement where the only light is the reflected glow from the television in
the cat’s eyes.
I don’t want anybody to think I’ve always been this
way. I loved Halloween as much as the
next person until I had children. And they went to school. And the school had
Halloween parades. Halloween parades where ghouls and witches and fairies and mummies marched from
room to room just before they gorged on apple fangs, pudding brains and
skeleton bone cookies, followed by the awarding a prize for the best
costume. Yes. You heard me.
Uh, I mean, read that correctly.
There was a Best Costume prize.
I know for a fact that costume parade was not for the kids. No sirrrreeeee. That parade was an insidious mother competition
that gave unfair advantage to mothers who knew how to turn on a sewing machine read a pattern and expertly
use a sewing machine; creative mothers who felt compelled to sew
a costume which actually FIT their child. Smelly, wrinkled, torn and jelly-smeared garments pulled from the dress-up
box were not good enough for their kids to wear in a Halloween parade. Nooooooo … those mothers stayed up half the
night sewing dinosaurs with twitching tails and princess dresses made of yards
and yards of tulle glittering with hand-sewn sequins. Consequently, those mothers who flaunted their
resourcefulness and professional sewing ability and crushed any inkling of confidence I might have felt after my attempts
at costume creation are the rea that costume parade is the reason for my intense dislike of
Halloween.
After this year though, I may not be the only one whose painful experience will be forever tied to this candy-devouring holiday. Or, in Myra’s case, this NO-candy-devouring
holiday. Recently she fell and knocked her face on a table, leaving one
partially descended front tooth hanging by a root while pushing the other one, which had not
yet descended at all, further up into her gum. That was horrible enough but after Ryan, covered in blood, rushed her to a dentist, she spent an hour lying patiently in a dental chair while her tooth was wired
back into her gum and that was, well, kind of gruesome. But not being able to wear her vampire teeth
on Halloween ... or eat any of the candy for two whole weeks … that's an unspeakable trauma which may
very well haunt Myra every Halloween for years to come.
