A quote: “Some people are born for Halloween, and some are just counting the days until Christmas.” ~~ Stephen Graham Jones
I’ll start with a story …
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The children were working on their jack-o-lanterns in the kitchen. She watched, sadly realizing this milestone meant they would too soon be grown and leaving. And she’d have little to look forward to – no bustling kitchen at breakfast, mugs of hot coco in front of the fire, no bundles of spring flowers picked for the entry.
She silently sobbed and the pantry door slammed shut.
Sissy looked up, “What was that?”
Brian shrugged, “House ghost.”
Sissy flicked a pumpkin seed at his forehead, “Stop it. You always say that.”
She drifted, wondering if the next family would have children, too.
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Now, it’s your turn.
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. featured image, cropped, Adobe Stock standard license.
Cameron says: The kids looked at me in puzzlement as I carefully whittled a face into a pumpkin. “You know we already have jack-o’-lanterns.”
“Yep,” I replied. “But this is another family tradition that you children need to know about.” I finished the work on the last one and waited.
Sure enough, the air went cold and three robed figures stood behind me. The kids paled in fright but I simply handed the jack-o-lanterns over. “They’re called Dullahans,” I said. “We give them something fun to do on Halloween and they look after the family. Now I’ll teach you how to carve.”
When I was in school, my favorite holiday was always Halloween, because it was a chance to dress up in costume, to slip free of my boring everyday life for a brief moment and be someone exciting. I still remember how I cried the year I got sick on Halloween and had to miss the party and costume parade. No, I didn’t get a makeup day — I had to stay an ordinary kid all the rest of the year — and by the time Halloween rolled around the next year, my costume didn’t fit any more.
When I was in my late teens I discovered conventions and of course I fell straight into the cosplay scene. I was never much into the craft of costuming — it was all about being able to dress up instead of having to wear ordinary boring clothes. I could be a steampunk aeronaut or a hero from my favorite anime or whatever all weekend long.
Out here, cosplay isn’t just for conventions. You see people walking down the street in Star Trek uniforms or goth Lolita vampire outfits, and nobody even raises an eyebrow. I haven’t worked up the nerve to go to work in cosplay yet, but I regularly do when I go to the coffeehouse to listen to a live band.
Sometimes I wonder whether the shift has something to do with the way Christmas has sort of taken over fall. When I was little, you never saw any Christmas decorations until after Thanksgiving. It simply wasn’t the done thing.
I still remember the excitement of going downtown the Friday after Thanksgiving to see Santa Claus arrive, sometimes from a helicopter, sometimes on a big red fire engine, signalling the beginning of the Christmas season. By the time I graduated from high school, Christmas decorations started going up mid-November, and Thanksgiving sort of got lost in the shuffle. Nowadays the Christmas decorations are coming into the stores before the plastic jack-o-lanterns and the big bags of mixed candy are even put on clearance. Who knows how much longer Halloween will be able to resist getting crowded out?
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