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 love this story and would have loved to try it, but fortunately there aren’t any cornfields around.
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 Ouijas. 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.
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