October 31, 2007

• Halloween Reminiscences

  HAPPY HALLOWEEN

  

  Some prefer Christmas and some Easter, and some prefer holidays of even less public appeal, but in my heart, Halloween will always be the best holiday of them all. If someone told me I could only have one holiday a year, I would choose Halloween. Even though I am allergic to most candy, at no other time of year is it acceptable to dress weirdly and go from house to house harassing your neighbors for handouts.

  I was eleven when I found out I was allergic to citric and malic acid and chocolate. Yes… I am allergic to chocolate. I am the inheritor of the genetic crapshoot. Ironically, I found out about these allergies at Christmas. My family thought I had a cold, a very bad cold. The school had a live tree that year, as did my family and my grandmother. It turns out one of my worst allergies is pine. Second, we had wool rugs. That’s another allergy that contributed to my congestion. Then, because oranges are good for you… my family kept feeding them to me along with copious amounts of juice. And finally, because they felt sorry for me, they also gave me lots of chocolate. Needless to say, I was very, very sick. I suppose it’s a good thing we didn’t have pets, or I might be dead. Though if the dustmites and feather pillows didn’t get me, I suppose I shouldn’t split hairs.

  It’s entirely possibly that my sickly Christmases are the reason it is not my favorite holiday. I remember one Christmas we all got the flu. I think everyone in the family got up and threwup in the hallway leading to the bathroom. That was a bad one. But it has been my allergies which have truly set the limitations of my enjoyment of life, and so you would think that all the candy I ingested, before the reality of my allergies set in, would also set me against Halloween, but ironically the autumn is the best time of year for me. Everything is dying and so all that pollen that makes me so sick and tired and congested from July to September is gone, and I actually feel better. I suppose it helps that I’ve grown up a bit and my food allergies are no longer as bad as they were as a child. More body mass for the “poisons” to get lost in… I can have chocolate now, in moderation, without breaking out in hives. I can have a glass of orange juice or an apple now and again without consigning myself to the bathroom for the rest of the day. (The less said about that, the better!) I can live with my food allergies. None of them are deadly. It’s the allergens that affect my breathing that interrupt my life, and so Halloween and the autumn are the best time if year for me.

  One of the best things about autumn is how the air feels and smells. Everything smells wonderful and tangy. Every season has its own set of smells, but autumn has a quiet, comfortable musk. Spring is the bitter sap of the world coming awake, and winter is sharp and metallic like blood. Summer smells like sweat and tears, but that may be the mucus talking. To each season, there is a reason… autumn is a lay you to rest kind of time. It lulls you to sleep in preparation for winter’s Big Sleep. Spring’s smells say wake up and summer says go out and be active, but autumn is about anticipation. It is an in between time. Not one thing or another.

  This may be why autumn, and Halloween, is one of the times when the Otherworld is so close you can almost reach out and touch it. The only other time is Midsummer’s Eve, and that’s just one day without much leading up to it. With Halloween, you can watch the world change as if in anticipation of the holiday. Autumn encourages celebrants to don their own party colors and join in the pageantry. I don’t think there is any other time of year that so appeals to our creativity. Funny story about Midsummer’s Eve though. I decided when I was 14 that I didn’t like this world, and I was going to try to get into the fairy Otherworld. I said goodbye to my mother and sat in her bedroom doorway until well past midnight, but never got to go anywhere. Such disappointment…. but I never tried at Halloween. I suppose I’d rather go to the fairy Otherworld than the afterlife Otherworld, though mythology and folklore would have them be the same place.

  What is your favorite Halloween memory?

  My fondest memory of Halloween was one I spent with a friend. We went to a graveyard which had a thin ribbon of woodland between itself and a road. We sat in the trees and when a car would drive down the road, we’d scream and growl and shake the saplings and generally make a nuisance of ourselves. I don’t know that we ever scared any of the drivers, but it was fun pretending that we were ferocious.

  

  • 8:01 pm
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