Why I love Halloween

Halloween was always my favorite holiday. I love the fall. Even though the leaves aren't brilliant like up east they turn colors of some sort. My Dad use to rake them in a pile and we would jump in them before he burned them. We savored the smell of burning leaves. Then there was my birthday a week before Halloween. But all of October was overshadowed by getting ready for Halloween.

Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter: all that is required is that you show up. Eat, open presents, search for eggs then it's over. Halloween I got to prepare. I got to think up a costume and make it myself, none of that store bought stuff. Halloween is the holiday for creative kids. I would sometimes have two or three costumes ready by the time the 31st came around and I would make costumes for some of my friends as well. I went as Dracula, Frankenstein, The grim reaper or the Wolfman. The year I dressed up as the Wolfman I took an old seal skin my Great Aunt had given me, cut it up and glued it to my face. Dedication.



I was partial to monsters. Besides comic books and Mad Magazine I always bought a copy of the latest Famous Monsters Magazine. Ironically I was not allowed to go to scary movies. After I jumped over the front seat at the drive in during Journey to the Center of the Earth (the part where the dinosaur, mistaken for a sidewalk begins to move and jostles the tiny folks walking on his back totally startled me) my mother wouldn't let me go see scary movies. But read about the movie monsters and I bought all of the monster models and meticulously painted them and glued them together. They paraded across my shelves and watched over me as I slept. I dressed up as one at Halloween.

One Halloween when we had gotten a bit older we set up a scary front porch. We draped it with black cloth and I stood over a cauldron with dry ice emitting smoke, dressed as the grim reaper giving out candy with a skeleton hand I had put together from a science kit. We rigged a ghost to fly down on fishing line from the Sycamore tree to the front porch as a kid on the roof let out a blood curdling scream. Other kids pretended to be dead in our makeshift graveyard only to jump up when the trick or treaters came by.

Some parents are very protective of their kids and I am of mine but I knew as a kid that evil existed. I had experienced it first hand in my family. One of the primary feelings that a kid has in that kind of situation is helplessness. How do you fight the monsters? How do you keep them at bay? Maybe one of the benefits of Halloween is that we let the monsters out into the light for a bit, maybe even become one. We acknowledge that the world is not made up of saints but sinners.Our ordinary family can contain monsters and we have to learn to confront the evil in ourselves and each other. And once acknowledged we even dare to mock the monsters knowing they do not have the upper hand forever and that God is even the God of monsters and that He can take the evil that men do to us and turn it into good.