Halloween

I love this time of year. I love the turning of the weather: the dark evenings, the foggy still mornings. Today has been a tempest of wind and rain and I was completely delighted by it. I love that my feet are cold at night, that I fall asleep bundled in covers. I love burning fall candles. I love cooking soup, I love hearing the rain on the roof. I love the thought of our little home and what it must look like from the street, its windows glowing from the light within, tucked into our little neighborhood.

But I have a confession, Dear Internet, on this night when everyone -- myself included -- is posting pictures of their children in their costumes: I kind of hate Halloween.

It’s the hugeness of it all. The expectation -- of fancy costumes, of bucketfuls of candy. I went on this big old capitalism rant this morning, which made Matt tease me a bit; usually he’s the Get off my lawn person in our marriage. But I truly hate it. The good news is that my children do love to dress up but are also easy to please; Suzannah’s Harry Potter costume was mostly cobbled together by bits of other costumes. Her old Darth Vader cape, for instance, and she made her own wand out of a branch. I did find a nice Harry Potter scarf for her, and a pair of Harry Potter glasses, but I didn’t go too crazy. Last year’s Luke Skywalker costume was created with a women’s extra-small scrub top and plain old black leggings, plus the leather belt from an old Ewok costume. It was pretty great. I bought Isaac an actual Batman costume, but he loves to dress up so much that we more than get our money’s worth, and anyway, I’m just not remotely crafty. At all.

Another confession: I don’t care about pumpkin carving. I just don’t really like doing it; I guess that goes back to the “not remotely crafty” thing. But Matt does like pumpkin carving, and we have some nice fat pumpkins from Isaac’s field trip to the pumpkin patch last week. So this afternoon, Matt and the kids produced some Halloweeny works of art, and we set out a few flickering jack-o-lanterns. And I do like that.

The other nice thing is that while my children love trick-or-treating, they don’t actually have the expectation of tearing through their candy. They nibble on it all year, and yesterday morning we actually dumped their leftover stash from last year into a plastic bag that I’ll toss into our bowl by the front door -- because kids knock on our door and expect candy, so I will hand it out by the fistful. But then again, I should probably just focus on the fact that our neighborhood is friendly and walkable and I do love seeing all the little ones and their siblings and cousins and parents, right?

A year or two ago I read an article that really resonated with me. I’m such an introvert; what I want to do on Halloween is turn off all the lights and huddle in the dark with a book or a movie and just not answer the door. But this article was all about how Halloween gives us the opportunity to open our doors to our neighbors, to make this momentary connection and to be a part of our community. We live in a lovely little neighborhood, but we don’t often have the chance to open our doors to each other like this, even just for a moment. I thought about that tonight when Matt took the kids out into the rainy night and I sat on the couch and typed notes back and forth with one of my seniors who’s submitting her college essay tomorrow. And instead of feeling annoyed when the knocks came, I found that I enjoyed the kids, many of whom I recognized, as well as the little glances exchanged with their parents. I thought about all the small ways I hope the world treats my own children kindly. I thought about how lucky I am to have a partner who takes my children trick-or-treating in the rain while I stay in to hand out candy. And so, in the end, it wasn’t at all difficult to tell the kiddos how much I loved their costumes, that I hoped they were having fun. The kids were all gracious and polite, and the parents lingering behind them all called their thank-you’s. It felt friendly. And while I’m sure all of those kids went home and dumped their candy on the floor for a frantic inventory the way mine do (ugh), I would like to believe, for just a moment, that the candy is secondary. That it isn’t even really the point.

Also, I realized this year that adolescent boys dressed in their jeans and trick-or-treating with plastic grocery bags just don’t bother me anymore. In my mid-twenties this drove me nuts. I would lecture my students about being completely lame: If you think you still have to go trick-or-treating, I would tell them, you’d better at least dress up as something cool. I’m not sure what shifted, or when; maybe there are just enough years between me and a fifteen-year-old to see something sweet in a boy who wants to preserve a little of his childhood, as tough as he might be. Tonight, a boy appeared by himself on my doorstep. He wasn’t dressed up as anything, really, and he held one of those plastic grocery sacks. And he was cool. When he said, “Trick or treat,” I wasn’t worried that he’d egg my house (a common worry my peers share when they explain why they grudgingly hand out candy; is this really a thing?). I said, “Happy Halloween...and have fun, kiddo.” And he smiled in that way that teenage boys do when they’re a little unguarded. “Yeah,” he said. “Thank you.” And he shuffled down my driveway.

I thought about how lonely the world can be sometimes. And about how maybe, even in the midst of my grumpy rants against buckets of sugared crap and capitalism, this night gives us these little moments to look into each other’s eyes and smile. To say, “I love your costume!” and “You are a perfect Elsa,” and “Have fun,” and “Be safe.” And I hope what was unspoken came through just as clearly: that I don’t care how fancy your costume is, or if you wear one. That I simply hope you transcend whatever ordinary moment you’re living in for a little while, and that the ordinary one is okay when you return. That I hope you see more kindness than scorn tonight. If only this night could just be about that.