My Mom & Halloween

Halloween was my mother's least favorite holiday.  Frankly, she despised it.  I think she just didn't get why people would want to dress up as creepy crawlies and scare each other half to death.

The thing is, I didn't find this out until I was well into adulthood and long past the days of trick-or-treating, costume shopping, and pumpkin carving.  When I was a kid, when I thought Halloween was the next best thing to Christmas, she was all over that holiday.  We decorated the house with silly Halloween stuff (goofy skeletons, smiling jack-o'-lanterns) and she stayed at home to hand out candy while my dad took me around the neighborhood.  If you would have asked me how my mom felt about Halloween when I was a kid, I would have told you she loved it.  But really, she loved me.   

My mom was not a crafty woman, but I remember vividly the year she spent weeks hand sewing an orange yarn wig to go along with the homemade clown costume my grandmother made me.  I can see her sitting at the kitchen table, painstakingly sewing loops of orange to an old sweatband.  I'm not sure why she didn't just buy me one of those rainbow-colored curly wigs, but I'm glad she didn't.  I remember us putting together an old lady costume out of her old clothes and the thrill it gave me to wear her things.  It made me feel different, grown up, a little wild.  All the feelings that dressing up brings out in me still.  

I don't think Halloween was a unique event.  I think Mom probably pretended to like lots of things for me.  I'm not a parent, so this particular brand of selflessness is completely foreign to me.  All I know is that I love everything associated with Halloween: crisp Autumn weather, dressing in costume, parties, the color orange, scary movies, pumpkins, haunted houses.  And that's all because of my mother, a woman who didn't like those things at all (that's not entirely true, she definitely liked parties).  The fact that she could instill in me something so completely opposite her own beliefs feels like magic.

Oh yeah, I like magic, too.  Happy Halloween, y'all.
  

That's not to say she didn't enjoy a little
dress-up now and again.