It’s that time of year, when ghosts and goblins and princesses and ninjas roam our neighborhoods, knocking on doors and taking away our candy. We get precious few trick-or-treaters where I live—largely hemmed in by an expressway on one side, major streets on two others, and a cul-de-sac to boot. So Halloween is often a disappointing affair marked by only a handful of visitors to our door.
It does make our dogs less fidgety, but we humans often find ourselves wanting a stronger dose of holiday juju, so we occasionally take our candy across town and sit with friends who can reliably count on a never-ending parade of trick-or-treaters. They get extra candy, we get a fix of kiddie cuteness, and everybody gets to sit around and socialize. Win-win-win.
It takes me back to the days when we would spend anywhere from a week to a month planning and executing home-made costumes for our son. There were Pokemon—Charmander and Butterfree and Pikachu—we’re talking the original 150 Pokemon here, folks. There was Bart Simpson. There was a spider. There was toxic waste—yes, my son dressed up as toxic waste. All costumes made to order by mom and dad. Usually the costume effort involved a giant sewing project for me and an amazingly creative headgear concoction by my husband. I miss those days. Kinda. They always reminded me of the astonishing Halloween concoctions that my mother made for my sister and me, costumes that consistently won first prize in our small-town Halloween parade. Now, those were the days. Ironically, the one Halloween picture staring at me from my old-time photo collection right now is the one with me wearing what probably was the only store-bought Halloween costume I ever had: Felix the cat. My sister is Little Red Riding Hood. I’m not too ashamed to share it—though maybe I should be.
As an adult, my favorite part of Halloween is carving pumpkins. Ever since the year I went away to college, I’ve been getting friends together to carve in a group. Some years there are only three or four of us. Sometimes there have been 50 or more. It depends on how much energy I have for cleaning and cooking.
My husband has become kind of a master carver, specializing in pumpkins that aren’t just carved but scraped and sculpted. You know the kind, where there’s a whole elaborate glowing face but only a few cuts that go all the way through the pumpkin. He works for days and days on his pumpkins, and the results are impressive. He shared a compendium of his favorite carvings a while back on Escape Into Life—well worth your time to enjoy. Me, I’m more of a traditionalist, whacking out holes for all of the features. But I like to mix up my pumpkins; they don’t necessarily look the same from year to year. It all depends how I’m feeling when I carve—and how I’m feeling when I choose the squash itself, because the shape of the pumpkin really does dictate the broad brush of its features.
Before Halloween, I go to some lengths to protect our pumpkins from squirrels. I like to offer a real showcase of our carving efforts on Halloween, even if hardly anyone but us will see it, so I generally don’t even set the pumpkins outdoors in advance. Bad things happen if I do. But after Halloween, well that’s a different story. I enjoy seeing what the squirrels do to the pumpkins then. For example…
I mean, how much fun is that?
I love watching our pumpkins’ squashy faces transform as they rot. Jack-o-lanterns, and the aftermath of Jack-o-lanterns, stick around in our garden for a long time, dissolving into the ground as compost. This little guy to the right was in the beginning stages of decomposition when I snapped this photo a couple years back.
My son still dresses up for Halloween, although he’s responsible for his own costumes now. I dressed up as a martini a few years ago and won a costume prize at our local distillery, but generally I don’t go that far down the Halloween trail. I do still like me some “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown!” though; you can never get too much of a Halloween classic.
