Boo!

Halloween has always been my favorite holiday.  I loved dressing up and going out at night.  Of course, until I was ten or so, my friends and I all went with a parent. .

Unitarian Christmas just seemed to get lost in a blur of inclusive celebrations – a Hanukah party featuring  pancakes without maple syrup, which we kids threw at each other; a Thanksgiving Seder, with readings from The Mayflower Compact and other Puritan writings instead of Exodus; and a Solstice Ceremony, which my father refused to attend.  There weren’t a lot of males there; afterwards my mother and her Unitarian girlfriends and their daughters would go out to a diner.  The grownups would talk about the Goddess and lament that the church hadn’t attracted any Wiccans.  Usually someone would complain about all the Christmas chores she still had to do, and they would laugh and say, “What are you, a Jesus freak?”  It was fun but a little uncomfortable to see the moms this way, laughing and talking and having a good time.


When my mother was a child, she had lived in a suburb that was really The Country.  There were cornfields on two sides of her house.  She and her friends would go into the fields, pick corn, shell it, and on the nights before Halloween, go out without adults, sneak up to windows of houses, throw the corn, and run away.  (It was animal corn, so it was hard, like the decorative Indian corn you see in stores, although in the summer, when it was soft, she and her friends would eat it.)  The bolder ones would ring the doorbell.  The kids loved this story and would have loved to try it, but fortunately there aren’t any cornfields around.

As usual, the girls had started planning their Halloween costumes in September.  Perhaps because she had been cheated out of a first communion veil, Cilla decided to be a bride.  Betsey couldn’t decide between being a vampire or a zombie until Josh decided that he wanted to be a zombie.  So vampire it was.  It would involve lots of makeup, perhaps because Betsey felt she’d been cheated out of being allowed to wear lipstick for the wedding.

In our town, Trick or Treat night is always the Friday or Saturday before Halloween, so the kids won’t be kept up too late on a school night.  This makes Halloween rather anti-climactic, but I always make a Halloween dinner, which we eat by candlelight; pumpkin soup from the intellectual deli and grilled cheese sandwiches imprinted with a jack-o-lantern. (I got the stamp in a set, with stamps of a smiley face,  Santa, an Easter egg, and a turkey.)  We have tomato juice to drink, since it looks like blood.

Karen asked me if I wanted to come over and try to contact Margaret with a Ouija board.  I said we always watch scary movies together, and why didn’t they come over here.  Maybe it makes me a wuss, but after The Exorcist, which gave me nightmares as a child, I’m afraid of them.  I asked Karen if they were going to have pea soup.

I would have told Karen that it would probably be more worthwhile to say a prayer for Margaret on All Saints’ Day, but I didn’t want to be an obnoxious churchlady.