Head's up: I am not going to celebrate (or whatever verb you choose) Halloween. I decorate minimally for every holiday anyway, and Halloween is no different: mine is the only house in the neighborhood without seasonal vegetables, ghosts, witches and plastic inflated creatures in the front yard. As usual the last few years, I am going to ignore Halloween.
Let me explain. I don't mean to be a grinch. I don't mean this to be an autumnal "Get off my lawn!" I don't want to be a spoilsport. I really don't. Fall is my favorite season; I like the cooler temperatures and the crunching leaves. Several times over the past few months, I have driven to New Hampshire, the place a friend calls "The Land of Robert Frost", and I have seen the foliage season emerge. I've seen more reds than I expected given the drought, and lots of golds and browns. Just gorgeous. Trees trees trees. And of course some are evergreens. (And as the Sandy Karaoke car went past the golds on Hogback Mountain in Vermont, it occurred to me that my three cats are autumn colored, too: orange tiger, calico, and a Halloween black cat with one eye. None of them, my familiars, has supernatural powers, but black Swishy does seem invisible when she scoots under the kitchen table after dark. That is a place of shadows, and she is a reminder that Lewis Carroll got the now-you-see-her-now-you-don't nature of the Cheshire Cat right--even if both you and the cat are without the assistance of pharmaceuticals.)
I'm not anti-autumn at all, and I will get to that. I just want to avoid Halloween again this year because it seems too contrived. Commercial.
I choose not to participate in Halloween because life is scary enough. What do I mean? I always close and lock the windows and doors when I am home (at least when the weather is cool enough). Ditto my car even when it is in my driveway. I also always use the parking brake.
Going to a Halloween party or greeting trick and treaters does not mitigate the possible horrors of everyday life.
As the saying goes, you could be hit by a bus tomorrow. Someone could go postal in the dairy section of the supermarket just as you are putting your yogurt in the grocery cart. Retire one month and then three months later your significant other dies unexpectedly. Cancer can grow slowly, so when you try to get out of a booth at a beach shack where you have just finished your first-of-the-summer lobster roll, you might discover that your legs won't work.
Just this afternoon as I was running errands, I saw an errant larger-than-life balloon jack-o'lantern bouncing down the street in the twenty mile an hour gusts. It just careened along, on the invisible air, plastic and unmoored.
Such an impersonal universe.
Black cat and symbol of Halloween Swishy was brought to the humane society as a stray. She had to have one eye removed, but no one I met when I adopted her knew why. Was the problem with her eye congenital, just a born-with-it wonky eye? Was it damaged in a fight with another animal? Was she harmed by children or adults before she managed to escape? Or did she try to make it down from a high branch and was poked in the eye because of her own misstep?
I don't think of my response to Halloween as paranoia. I don't think I am being over-sensitive or humorless or in possession of an overactive imagination. (Well, okay, maybe a little on that last.) But which way should I bet?
I don't need to make the day fun. I am not going to dress up as a pirate or a cat or Hermione. (Why should I if there is a party going on in my head 24/7 and you are not invited? Please see a previous blog posting.) If someone else--young or old--wants to dress up as Big Papi or a zebra or a mermaid, go for it.
But how many people do I know--correction, DID I know--who are no longer among us in this beautiful world we inhabit? Too many for me to find entertainment in faux graveyards and dancing skeletons. For me the wolf--even if it is a tiny wolf--is at the door 24/7/365. Dressing up as somebody else, real or fictional, will not keep the wolf from the door. I just can't get into the spirit of the Halloween season.
And I have a distant second reason for not participating in Halloween: I don't want to be part of the commercial corporate holiday it has become with candy in stores right after Labor Day and every house regaled with emblems of the spirit of the season. (Not to mention the neighborhood O-O-O-O-O sound effects and the Halloween mood lighting.) Granted, I do think really small children dressed as ghosts and goblins and Elsa and any other manner of other Disney/Pixar characters are cute. And this is the one time a year when children can accept candy from strangers. But I would prefer not to subsidize somebody else's kid's sugar habit. If this seems grinchy, so be it.
There was a time when I did do Halloween. At various points I was a beatnik, a witch, and a clown (long before the current clown terrorism and, well, prom queen zombie costumes). I went trick or treating for UNICEF. After that I do remember a party or two and bobbing for apples and feeling grape eyeballs in the dark. But no costumes.
I liked the holiday enough when I was younger. I don't mean to kill anybody's joy. But if you stop and think about the injustices, the horrors and accidents, the vicissitudes and agonies in the world near and far, the scariness of Halloween is potentially every day--not just at the beginning of the darkest time of the year.
I mean, given the ways of the world, who needs somebody jumping out and saying, "BOO!"?
And yes, I did use to give out candy to the few small kids who came by, usually just at dusk. As often as not, their parents, my neighbors, stood halfway down the driveway. As the night wore on, cars of high school kids emptied out in the neighborhood, and the later the evening got, the taller and rowdier the costumed celebrants got. And once when I did stay up and provided Hershey bars to to the 9 o'clock (and later) trick or treaters, I discovered the next morning that my stockade fence had been spray painted.
I guess they didn't like the Hershey bars.
But these days the school bus does not rumble by in the morning, which means there are no nearby little ghosties and aspiring goblins.
Ignoring Halloween is also just a piece of who I am. Setting aside Godzilla, Frankenstein and King Kong (all of which I watched through my fingers on black and white television decades ago), I have seen only one horror movie, The Shining (and I kept my eyes down in the theater through most of it). No Pinhead, no Texas Chainsaw Massacre, no Halloween Part Whatever. I did try to finish Stephen King's Mr. Mercedes, but the end got just too nervous-making, so I gave the book away. (I did enjoy King's 11/22/63, though.)
And now to autumn: so this weekend before Halloween I will finally move the furniture from the deck into the garage for the winter and will dump this year's few annuals (they are still partially green as I write this) on the curb. This is as close to a harvest as I will get. And so I will recognize the turning point of one season to the next; my hands will be stiff in the cold, and the smell of the neighbor's wood stove will be in the air. I will want a warm meal afterwards, and, as night falls, a glass of wine. Maybe I will wonder (as I usually do), if it is too late in the season to plant bulbs, just crocuses, but most likely I will let that idea go away as I always do. I like the cold if not the dark that comes early, but the indoors is cozy.
I haven't seen any Canadian geese going south yet, honking in the overcast, but I will. Thanksgiving is less than a month away, one of my favorite holidays even if my decorating will again be minimal at best. At some point before Thanksgiving, the lawn guy will come vacuum up the leaves and they will end upon the curb, too. Thanksgiving means another ride over Hogback Mountain. Good.
On Halloween, as I have in the past, after an early dinner I will turn off the outside lights, close the curtains and make sure only one light upstairs is on. I won't be unhappy if it rains. Because it is a holiday that can be dangerous to cats, I will make sure mine are all inside even though they are always inside.
I will go upstairs and watch Netflix or read. The cats will eventually follow me upstairs. We will stay warm.
Robert Frost, he of New England, wrote "Nothing gold can stay", and he's right as far as he goes. Around Halloween things do die. But Frost does not take into consideration memory (not to mention evergreens) and the turn--and return--of the seasons. We hope that we have--that we will live to have--another autumn, one not unlike the ones we have known before, ones where we learned that the shadows start to come earlier and earlier.
In that cycle is comfort.
Not long from now the leaves will all have turned and fallen. The ground will be too hard to plant bulbs even though the evergreen hedge will not need trimming until May.
Yes, nothing gold can stay. But even with no leaves, the trees still stand tall.
Copyright Sandra Engel
October 2016
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