As I’ve written about before, my mom died when I was eight years old.
My dad never remarried and though we had plenty of much appreciated help from local relatives, friends, church members, and neighbors, a lot of responsibility naturally fell on my shoulders as not only the oldest child but also the oldest daughter. I was in many ways my mom’s mini-me and I learned to crave the praise and validation that came from being told I was “just like Sharon.”
As the years went by, my dad began to resist and abhor anything that broke the comfort of his routine. Regularly scheduled activities, like weekly church band rehearsal or games and practices during the years my brother played Little League baseball, were fine and posed no problem. But unexpected hassles, like doctor’s appointments or science fair projects, especially if they cost money, increasingly threatened his ability to hold on to his temper and, more than that, his ability to continue fooling himself into believing that he had a handle on, y’know, his life.
Which made Halloween, with its multiple layers of variables, a particularly stressful occasion in our household. Getting three kids dressed up in their outfits of choice was a pain in the ass; candy and costumes cost money that wasn’t always in abundance; the weather was often unpredictable; someone both had to be available to take us kids trick or treating and to give candy out at our front door. In other words, hassle upon hassle upon hassle.
In an attempt to mitigate some of this hassle, it wasn’t long before it started to make the most sense for me to stay home, giving out the candy at our front door, while my dad (if he got home from work early enough) or one of my grandparents took my brother and sister trick or treating. I still got to dress up (the year that I wore a huge, borrowed fur coat and sprayed half my hair white as Cruella de Vil got a particularly enthusiastic response), and I usually still got to go to the costume contest held annually at the middle school gymnasium down the street, so it never felt like that much of a sacrifice to me. I either ate candy from my siblings’ stash or pilfered from the bowl of whatever we were giving out, so I didn’t lose out in that respect either.
But still, I eventually felt myself adopt my dad’s point of view about the holiday—it began to seem like a ridiculous hassle that I saw the point of less and less as I got older. Never one for large parties as a teenager, or the bar scene once I hit drinking age, there seemed to be little point in even attempting to put together a costume, especially since, always self-conscious about my weight, I never felt like I would have been able to pull off the “sexy” costumes that were increasingly de rigueur for girls older than, say, about 13.
Yes, there was a lovely year in college when my best friend and her fiancé and I spent a few happy weeks leading up to the 31st carving pumpkins and watching movies like Bram Stoker’s Dracula together, but the best thing about Halloween for me, after a while, was the slashed price of leftover candy at the grocery stores on November 1.
So, even now in my mid-30s, as Tumblr and Instagram begin to fill up with all manner of #spoopy enthusiasm for Halloween, I find myself slogging through a persistent, inherited, but now groundless sense of avoidance. And honestly, it bums me out that I’ve allowed myself to become so Halloween-resistant! This holiday should be right up my alley! It happens during my favorite season and it’s a significant energetic threshold for so many spiritual traditions.
Not to mention, there is almost nothing I crave more in life than being seen. I love being the center of attention. I love wearing strange or outlandish clothing and getting noticed and complimented for it. (Not for nothing did I dye my hair bright pink for several years.) So, Halloween should be a natural for me, right? A day specifically set aside for looking one’s craziest, right? Well, yeah—but I’m contrary enough that I like looking crazy on the rest of the days of the year when muggles aren’t usually competing to get in on the act as well. It’s like the episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer when the gang learned that real demons traditionally take October 31 off. Yeah, me too.
I’d love to give you an optimistic turnaround here and say that I have plenty of things that still make October meaningful for me. But I’m not sure that’d be entirely true. Sure, I love the color of the changing leaves and the crisp air and the fall wardrobe staples and the hot coffee and early sunsets that make it a particularly sensual and invigorating month. But in terms of feeling specifically compelled to observe any kind of annual ritual honoring the slide into the dark part of the year, I sadly find myself coming up short.
Mindlessly replicating old family patterns seems a particularly ineffective and self-defeating way to justify my admittedly, unpleasantly sharp-edged, high-pitched refusal to join in on the Halloween fun. But maybe that serves, in its own perverse way, as my own method of observing the Day of the Dead—communing with the spirit of Hassle and invoking Stagnant Predictability as a way of inadvertently reminding myself that, yes, there’s plenty of darkness in my life and memories still left to explore, no matter how much I may dress myself up in optimism otherwise.
Queen of Peaches 