I really enjoy Judith Warner's blog Domestic Disturbances at the NY Times. She's so delightfully imperfect. I am far from the perfect parent. My kids always have dirty faces and the house is never just so. Normally, I am right there with her when she complains about over parenting, or overly perfect parenting. But on this particular day, I couldn't have disagreed with her more. Here's a comment that I posted on Judith's Hapless on Halloween entry. After I wrote it, I thought, "you know, I want to put this on my blog too." So I did. Skate America conflicts with Halloween almost every year and that's always a problem for me since Halloween is my favorite holiday. This year, I ditched skating for candy and blue dogs.
You know what? I LIKE Halloween. Okay, so my kids don’t have the greatest costumes–and when they do, my mom makes them. She’s retired, has time, and was always a fantastic costumer. But I carve the pumpkins–we always have the best ones in the neighborhood because I love carving pumpkins. I’m teaching my oldest to carve. She is decent enough with a knife not to cut herself, but very ambitious and oft comes to grief. I make sure they’re dressed and warm and then Daddy takes them from door to door.
And while they are trick or treating, I sit on my front lawn in a sling chair with our bichon frise Killer which we have dyed blue for the holiday (Blues Clues? Blue Dog Democrat, anyone?). And I sit there and remember all the great Halloweens from my past. The one where mom made my brother a frog head and he went as a frog prince. There was the year I was an alligator and won a year’s pass to the skating rink for best costume. There was the fun of running pell-mell from house to house in the cold, spooky dark, shrieking all the way–no matter what we were wearing.
When I fade back from memory into reality, there’s candy heaped high in an antique wooden bowl–the same one we used when I was a kid. It’s bliss to hand out handfuls to the ever dwindling clumps of children–there are fewer ever year.
And it breaks my heart.
Most kids who trick or treat in our neighborhood come up from the poor inner-city places, where drugs, crime, and hopelessness, lack of opportunity and yes, downright laziness, have made it too dangerous for a child to walk up to a house and say “trick or treat.” Too many tricks down there. Some people might say they don’t belong here. But they make no trouble and something in me wants to scream how these kids deserve just as much as mine to have fun on Halloween. They deserve to have fun running gleefully from house to house, parents trailing along behind. They deserve a handful of candy from someone who thinks Halloween isn’t a chore. They deserve to be children.
And for one night in October, so do I.
