Ah, the days are growing shorter. The leaves are falling and creating wonderful foley sound effects under our feet. We’re almost done our annual battle with our lawn. Yes, it’s autumn. Time to decorate our home to resemble the Addams Family house and show our creepiness and kookiness a bit more freely. Halloween costume choices have been finalized and it’s time to start sewing.
This year we’ll have a clown with really deep pockets that can store all of the clown’s fun toys. Our oldest wants to stock the pockets with a rubber chicken, a horn, a water-squirting flower, the whole classic repertoire of clown classics. My hubby will dress as the Ring Master of the circus and introduce the clown’s act. The only thing that will be missing is a tiny car.
For the more macabre child, we will be creating a Headless Horseman, complete with horse (made out of a wagon) and covered bridge that he never quite crosses. I will be the covered bridge, pulling the horse-wagon, and he will ride atop it in all his headless glory. At least he’ll have a mode of transportation for when he gets tired after the fourth house.
I love Halloween. Probably because my birthday is close to it and I always had Halloween themed birthday parties. People at work threw me a lovely surprise party last year for my 40th-complete with macabre theme, telling me 40 isn’t so scary! I love the creepiness that oozes its way in to the every day come autumn. Perhaps it is because the leaves are dying, the earth is shutting down for the long winter. The animals hibernate, having stocked up for the cold, and the nights are no longer filled with the sound of the summer symphony but rather the eerie stillness of nothing.
The fog we’ve had the past few mornings has been lovely, except for the impact it is having on my bloody commute. It’s only fog, people, keep driving. Last week was Uncle Stevie’s birthday and Jersey celebrated with fog in the morning and a gray, drizzly afternoon. Perfect weather for his special day.
Scary movies get pulled out of the vaults to scare the masses. Michael Jackson’s Thriller will be played in heavy rotation. And Charlie Brown will tell us once again that he got a rock. Ah, tradition. One year, our sons got to meet the Great Pumpkin. We went to a pumpkin patch to get our pumpkins and one of the boys sat down on a pumpkin, with a thoughtful look on his face. I asked what he was thinking and he told me this was a very sincere pumpkin patch and that the Great Pumpkin was sure to visit it. We were invited back for Halloween to see if he showed up, and sure enough, the Great Pumpkin visited that very sincere pumpkin patch. How cool is that?
Another great thing for our sons is that our neighborhood is old-school. The boys get to trick or treat at a good number of houses and I don’t have to worry about the people giving them candy. We know them. The town has a curfew at 8:00pm that night (and on Tic Tac Night, too…though most call it Mischief Night nowadays). Once the boys are a little older, not much, probably next year, I’ll let them soap up our windows and toilet paper our tree. Ah, tradition.
There is a tree in the middle of an intersection in the town my husband grew up in and every year for as long as he’s known, the tree gets covered with toilet paper on either Tic Tac or Halloween night (I can’t recall which). It blows in the wind and we see it the next Sunday on our way to church. It’s a grand tradition, one that I hope never ends. It doesn’t harm anything, TP is biodegradable. A tradition that recently ended was the mystery visitor at Edgar Allan Poe’s grave. The current theory is that the 200th anniversary of his birth in 2009 was the last time, as the mystery visitor was a no-show in 2010 and 2011. I wish that tradition could have lived on. I had never attended it, but I know there were regulars who witnessed it each year. The person would sneak in, place the roses in the pattern and drink the cognac toast, a fitting tribute for one of the masters of macabre.
There are several other events I hope to experience that are traditional at this time of year. There’s the fun over at Eastern State Penitentiary, but my boys are still underage. Then there are the festivities in Tarrytown, home of the Headless Horseman. Those both can be enjoyed on various days leading up to Halloween because until my sons tell me they don’t want to trick or treat, I will happily make their costumes. One of my happiest jobs as a mother. Even when they stop dressing up, I probably still will. It’s just too much fun. And a little creepy.
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