Halloween as a Catholic school girl was not one, but two full days of childhood nirvana.
There was the actual day, and the lead-up at school. Everybody, including Sister Mary Elizabeth, was so excited we didn’t even try to get work done.
There was coming home after school, waiting forever for the sun to set while snarfing hot dogs and begging Mama to hurry up with final touch-ups to homemade costumes.
There was the excitement of running door to door in the chill of the night with my three sisters, gypsy scarves flying, and the thrill of eating candy without restrictions.
The next day was a bonus: It was All Saints’ Day in the Catholic Church, a holy day, which means we didn’t have to go to school and instead could lie in bed as long as we wanted with our trick-or-treat bags and holy cards.
As parents, we aim to give our children the pleasures we had.
I couldn’t give my public-school kids the day off.
But I could engage with them in everything else Halloween — planning costumes, going to the fabric shop, then re-creating Dorothy, cowboys, Snow White, Jimi Hendrix, bunny rabbits, all by hand. I was the mom who liked tromping door to door with the kids, who had chili waiting when we got back and who experimented with letting them dictate how much candy was too much in one sitting.
This backfired on me once when Emily was 3.
Coming back from an after-trick-or-treat party, she was in the way back of the van strapped into her car seat when she suddenly started shrieking. “Save me, Mommy! Save me!” I looked in the rearview mirror to see the poor thing throwing up all over her Tigger costume. I regulated candy after that.
Those days have come and gone, but not Halloween, not in this college town where the Saturday before Oct. 31, the downtown streets and bars fill with thousands of students who come from throughout the region to showcase outlandish costumes.
My millennial kids and their friends have dressed as collectives, as the pieces of a chess game and as the solar system, which didn’t work out so well when one of the planets, not a drinker, had one shot of tequila, threw up and passed out, destroying the lineup. This happened to be the selfsame sensitive-stomached Tigger.
We older adults, meanwhile, dared at some point to start dressing up, too, spending weeks like the kids concocting costumes every year and meeting at a downtown bar to express our hidden identities.
Throughout the years I have been a Catholic school girl with white knee-highs and a lace doily on my head; a go-go dancer with white patent leather boots and a neon orange mini-dress; and a Southern belle complete with an old bridesmaid’s dress I pulled out of a trunk in the basement.
One year I pulled out all the stops and was an authentically outfitted flamenco dancer with an overlaid lace-and-silk dress I got at a fancy thrift shop. The dress was expensive, but the alterations cost even more.
As aging will have it, mobility issues these days mean no more walking around downtown. Still, we get in the car and drive to the bars to see a who’s-who of vampires and French maids. I continue the tradition of Halloween at home by overdecorating with ceramic pumpkins, oversized felt acorns in the front window and tacky Dollar Store stick-on pumpkins on the back door. On trick-or-treat day, I put out a bowl of expensive candy with a sign that says “Take one” and then stand at the front door and ask each trick-or-treater who they are. I don’t know half their characters, but I ask anyway as I take their pictures.
This year, after so many years of a costume hiatus, just before trick-or-treat time, I trundled out of my sciatica bed to put out candy. But first I donned a bandanna, dangly earrings and an embroidered, off-the-shoulder blouse and became an aging version of Mirabel from the Disney movie “Encanto.”
Adults will apparently never stop Halloween-ing. Last year, according to the National Retail Federation, U.S. consumers spent $10.1 billion on costumes, decorations, treats and other Halloween-themed expenses. This includes 600 million pounds of candy, which amounts to 3.4 pounds of candy per person.
"Halloween has survived because it allows us to engage with our fear — our fear of death, of the dark of winter, of the unknown — in the same space that encourages wild joy,” Megan McClintock wrote recently for Medium.com. “It transforms the things that we dread the most into a celebration where we can embrace of the things we don’t understand.”
Or maybe it’s simpler than all that. Maybe adults just want to have fun, too. And what better fun than the fun culled from childhood, perfected through our own children and brought into the vagaries of adulthood.
Some see the continuation of the holiday into our later years as an immature, holding-on-to-childhood thing. More of that baby boomer bashing poppycock.
I meanwhile think of the musings of Faith Hill, associate editor of culture for The Atlantic.
“These days, I spend most of my weeks in grim focus: working, thinking about work, considering my future, talking with my friends about their future. Occasionally, I break and listen to dismal news podcasts or read sad books. It’s a great life to have, and it’s largely the one I want.
“(But then) contrast that with last Halloween, when I wore a pink jersey girl cap, pink sunglasses, and a pink sequined tube dress and called myself the ‘Spirit of New Jersey.’ I danced in a room of people who looked equally stupid and embarrassing; ugly little goblins floated on the walls, cast by a dusty projector; two separate baby dolls, abandoned by their handlers, surfed the crowd.”
May I always have the equivalent of a pink tube dress in my closet.
