Scenes from a Halloween

I'll tell you this right up front--my favorite holiday is Halloween. Always has been. Always will be.

Unlike the other major holidays, Halloween asks nothing of  you. You don't have to mess with a turkey, send out a bunch of cards, or fight for your life in shopping center parking lots.

Instead, you get to play dress-up on a gorgeous autumn evening and go foraging in your neighborhood for delectable morsels that, properly rationed, will last you until Christmas. As an adult, you get to keep doing this vicariously through your children and then, if you are truly blessed, through your grandkids.

Around Googie's house we tend to make Halloween a festival. With four of the six kids living three hours away, it rarely works out for us to be together on Oct. 31. But don't think that means we haven't done our best to observe this most glorious time of year in fine fashion. Here are the pictorial highlights of that celebration.

Here, Pooh, Zoomie, and Bootsie model their costumes following a discussion of the importance of body stance and facial expression in portraying character. The kids have often been beneficiaries (or victims) of my college theatre training. However, they are hams by nature, so I don't think I have done any permanent damage.

Beenie and I spent a recent afternoon learning about all-things-Egypt, culminating in this impersonation of a mummy. Requiring the investment of one and one-half rolls of toilet paper, the costume required fifteen minutes to apply and fifteen seconds to demolish. But the process led us to speculate on some of the more thought-provoking nuances of mummification.

How did mummies go to the potty? Easy--the TP was already there. How did mummies breathe? Well . . . back then they didn't need quite as much air as we do.

Speaking of monsters, no Halloween festival is worth its weight in Laffy Taffy without making a few monsters of our own. Using a foam craft kit from a Hobby Lobby clearance sale after some other wonderful Halloween, Sooby, Bootsie, Zoomie, Pooh, and I construct our Frankensteins.

In the course of the monster-making, I told them about Mary Shelley, who wrote her short, brilliantly visionary Frankenstein novel while at a retreat with her husband and their other writer friends. Yes, kids, Frankenstein was written by a girl. Don't underestimate us.

Politely begging your indulgence here, let me preserve for posterity a selfie with Washington Irving's famous Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow fame. As a special  treat this past weekend, Pa-pa, Bootsie, and I went to see a community theatre musical of the same name.

This lesser known 2009 musical, with book and lyrics by Jim Christian and music by Tom Edward Clark, was highlighted for us due to the musical direction and piano/flute performances of Bootsie's mama, our daughter Cookie. It was thoroughly delightful, and will always be a unique aspect of Halloween 2016.

Finally, no Halloween festival is complete without the requisite cookie-making. Here you see Heero, who will turn three years old next week, capably spreading frosting on an orange-eyed ghost. With brother Beenie's help, we were able to produce this delectable platter of homemade sugar cookies (none of which have survived) to carry us through as we counted down the days to Halloween 2016.

As I type this, the big day itself has arrived. Beenie had his Halloween party at preschool this morning, and Heero is celebrating likewise at daycare. Sooby, Pooh, Bootsie, and Zoomie are getting ready for trick-or-treating Kansas-style. I am thankful to have been able, once more, to share this favorite holiday with all of them.

Next up: the Thanksgiving Wiener Roast. Stay tuned to see if this great Missouri weather holds for us.

But meanwhile, Happy Halloween!

The Many Faces of Halloween

One of the things I love about Halloween is its versatility. It does not restrict itself to certain mandatory activities like opening presents at Christmas, shooting fireworks on July 4, or cooking a turkey for Thanksgiving.

It also allows itself to be celebrated on gorgeous October days other than the 31st. That is especially helpful if distance and family schedules don't always allow Googie to see her kids on that particular day.

In past years the kids and I have embraced the Halloween spirit in numerous ways. When they were smaller, the older ones sometimes trick or treated on our subdivision, or we moved the festivities to the farm for a family wiener roast. Three years ago Sooby, Pooh, and I resurrected "Scarecrow Man" (see the post from Sept. 24, 2011) for the first time since my own children were younger.

This year our Halloween celebration took its spooky, fun-filled place a week early. When the kids got to Googie's last weekend, this is the list they found posted on the pantry door, giving them a variety of Halloween-themed activities to choose from:

Following is a pictorial chronicle of some our accomplishments. First, the foam Frankenstein crafts, followed by the poster-making, aptly demonstrated by Bootsie:

Then, on to the anatomy lesson afforded by our skeleton puzzle, a new-in-the-package garage sale treasure I snagged earlier in the month:

Our "spooky dessert" was a duet of chocolate cake and orange sherbet, but, sadly, it did not last long enough for me to capture digitally. The veggie skeleton, our contribution to a neighborhood wiener roast, fared better:

Finally, in time-honored Halloween tradition, we carved a pumpkin (facial features designed by Sooby and Bootsie). Although it wasn't on the list, Sooby decided a spontaneous toasting of pumpkin seeds was appropriate. (I had forgotten exactly how to do this, but we washed them, put them on a cookie sheet, sprinkled them with olive oil, shook on some seasoned salt, and baked them at 350 for about 13 minutes, turning once.)

The one thing I was looking forward to that didn't get done was wrapping the kids up like mummies in toilet paper, but we can always save that for next year. For several years I have also been saving a plastic jack-'o'-lantern leaf bag for the kids to fill--but I forgot to put that on the list, and we ran out of time anyway. Maybe next year.

Tonight my little spooks will be trick or treating in their home neighborhoods, and I will be home by myself dispensing candy to other little goblins--but that's OK. We have had a large dose of Halloween fun for this year, and October 2015 is just eleven months away.

Good News and Bad News

There is good news and bad news.

The bad news is that this will be the first Halloween I don't get to spend with my grandkids in the four-plus years since Sooby was born.  On the brighter side, we have already racked up some serious pre-Halloween fun.  We have stuffed a scarecrow with straw and roasted hot dogs and marshmallows at the farm.  Twice now they have terrorized the house and yard in the costumes I bought last November at Wal-Mart for 75% off.

Speaking of which, there is good news and bad news on that front as well.  Sooby's candy corn witch outfit, though adorable, was not without its drawbacks.  Once the spring-hoop skirt emerged from the package where it had been restrained against its will for Lord-knows-how-long, it refused to go back in like a good little article of clothing.  For the two weeks that followed, it took up so much room that it practically required its own closet.

Then, there was the problem with the hat, an ingeniously designed little headpiece shaped like the traditional witch hat but colored yellow, orange, and white like a piece of candy corn.  In his or her preoccupation with aesthetics, the designer failed to take into account the centrifugal force that comes into play when a child reaches mach speed and negotiates a 180-degree turn.  Translation: the hat won't stay on.  But good news prevails once more when Googie whips out her trusty needle and thread, slices a shoestring in half, and fashions a clever, makeshift tie that fastens right beneath the chin of the whirlwind.  Once again, all is right with the world.

That is, until we get to Pooh, whom I had envisioned in the requisite headband and a little black Ninja jumpsuit whose bright blue apron is emblazoned with a very mean-looking golden bird of some sort.  The bad news is that the Ninja costume has never hai-karated itself out of the package.  Instead, Pooh has been obsessed with an old skeleton costume that I picked up at a garage sale a couple years ago for a quarter.  It seems that he rather likes being a "'keleton."

The good news here is manifold.  He is absolutely the cutest 'keleton I have ever seen, and the Ninja suit will more than likely still fit him next year.  As an added advantage, his little bones will glow in the dark while he trick-or-treats, duly terrorizing his baby sister while enhancing his safety.  OK, so no foul here.

Here is what is foul.  I absolutely could not wait to see Baby Bootsie as a wooly little white lamb, and the suit did not disappoint.  It was soft and cuddly and couldn't have fit her better, from the fleecy bodice to the little pink satiny hooves.  Indeed, Googie was patting herself on the back from the utter perfection of this picture--that is, until we looked around for the hat.

We looked everywhere.  The fluffy tie-on hat with the little pink ears was nowhere to be found.  It had either been omitted by the manufacturer or lost somehow in the giant Wal-Mart bin as greedy customers like Googie churned and pawed the contents in search of the perfect deal.  Clearly, it was a situation where the emptor did not caveat quite enough, and, let me tell you, I was one disappointed emptor.  However, the good news is that Bootsie's mama thinks it will not be too hard to fashion substitute ears for our little lamb, and she will not have to take to the streets as the sheep-like equivalent of a centaur.

And so, as Halloween arrives a few nights from now, I will miss the jack-o-lantern carving and cookie decorating of the past several years, and that might be construed as bad news.  But I understand that, although I am and will always be the only true Googie, we are not the only grandparents, and this year it is our turn to share.

On Monday night I will watch out the door as hordes of costume-clad children revel in the excitement of their annual candy-gathering odyssey.  And in my mind's eye, I will see a candy corn witch, a 'keleton, and maybe a little earless lamb doing the same, and that, any way you look at it, is good news.
     

In Halloween Mode

Maybe I was homesick for the old journalism days.  Maybe I was missing the grandkids.  Maybe I was just looking for a way to indulge myself in the substance of my favorite holiday. 

Whatever the case, the result was a hankering to once again conduct a phone interview.  With Sooby and Pooh.  On the subject of Halloween.  Following is the closest thing to a transcript of that event I can muster.  It began much as you would expect, with Googie on speakerphone.

Q:  What is your favorite thing about Halloween?
A:  (Sooby) Going trick-or-treating.  (OK, scrap that.  Unnecessary question, obvious answer.  Duh.)

Q:  What is your favorite kind of candy to get when you go trick-or-treating?
A:  (Sooby) Candy bars, lollipops, candy kisses, Nerds . . . . (List continues, but voice trails away.)
A:  (Pooh)  Chocolate.  (A child after my own heart.  Succinct answer.  Recognition that, when you say the word "chocolate," nothing more needs to be said.  Or eaten.  Or invented.)

Q:  What is your favorite costume?
A:  (Pooh)  A 'keleton.
A:  (Sooby) A candy corn witch.  (Note: Both are costumes from Googie's house.  The 'keleton: a quarter at a garage sale; the witch: 75% off sale at Walmart last November.  Good job, Googie.)

(Long silence.  Interviewer falters.  Interviewer struggles to recall TV interview style and content, then resumes.) 

Q:  Many people seem to denounce Halloween as a dark holiday that celebrates wickedness and evil.  Do you perceive evil forces at work on Halloween?
A: (Pooh) Huh?
A: (Sooby) Just my brother.

Q:  What do you consider the sociological ramifications of Halloween in a society where such a pronounced dichotomy seems to exist between the ideologies of good and evil?
A:  (Pooh) ZZZZzzzzz . . . .
A:  (Sooby)  (After a long silence and two verses of "Old MacDonald") Halloween is fun.

Bingo.  I couldn't have said it better.  For me, Halloween has always represented pure, carefree fun.  You get to dress up.  You get to be outside in what is usually gorgeous Indian summer weather.  You have parties and bonfires.  You get free candy.  You collect a stash of sweets that, if you are judicious, will last until Christmas. 

Halloween has never required that I thaw a rock-hard turkey in my refrigerator for four days and then cook it for hours.  It has never asked me to drag a tree out of the attic and stick stuff all over it.  I don't have to send dozens of cards against a deadline or negotiate a shopping list as long as my arm.

Halloween asks me only to think like a kid and have some serious fun.  I love doing both, and I think that people who read all kinds of sinister things into the holiday should maybe buy their underwear a size bigger.

That said, I have a confession to make.  It may surprise you to learn that not all of the phone interview went exactly as recorded above.  I  allowed myself a tiny bit of poetic license toward the end there.  Forgive me.  It is the season of Halloween, and the kids and I are in full fun mode.

   




 

Scarecrow Man: The Sequel

This year my grandkids are old enough to make a scarecrow man, and I am so excited.  Next weekend can't some soon enough to suit me.

This will take some thinking and remembering on my part.  It has been about fifteen years, I think, since I built my last such creation.  When Cookie and Teebo were still at home, the building of Scarecrow Man was as much a part of our October ritual as painting pumpkins, carving jack-o'lanterns, roasting hot dogs, and riding around town in our minivan with a huge inflatable skeleton strapped safely in the back seat.

I have been biding my time these last four Octobers waiting for the perfect year to reinstitute Scarecrow Man as an October tradition, and I have the unmistakeable feeling that this is it.  I can feel it in the gentle chill of these gorgeous late September mornings, and I can see it in the autumnal slant of the sunshine.  I can hear that raspy whisper calling to me:  "If they come, you will build it."  Yep.  Kevin Costner and I have a little something in common here.

Tucked away on a shelf in the basement are the flannel shirt and bib overalls that I rescued from the garage sale box just for this purpose.  They have been waiting patiently for Scarecrow Man's return.  I will need only to confiscate from Pa-pa an old pair of gloves, an old pair of boots, and a straw hat. Then, I will need to talk him into bringing me two bales of straw from the farm, one to use for stuffing and the other for the finished Scarecrow Man to perch on as he assumes his place of honor  against the retaining wall out front.  Oh, and I can't forget to buy a pumpkin:  Scarecrow man will most certainly need a head.

Next Saturday or so Sooby, Pooh, and I will stuff the shirt and bibs with straw and tie the legs and sleeves and waist with binder twine or big rubber bands.  We will tuck his legs into the boots, stick the gloves at the ends of his sleeves, balance his head atop the shirt (Scarecrow Man does not have a neck--he is an anatomic anomaly in this regard.), and top him with the hat.  Then, we will prop our life-size new friend on his straw bale, magic-marker him a face, and stand back to admire our work.  I imagine there will be a photo shoot in which Scarecrow Man will captivate everyone with his crooked-toothy jack-o-lantern smile.

A couple days ago I was talking to Sooby on the phone and telling her about our plans to build Scarecrow Man next time she comes to visit.  The phone line went quiet, and I knew she was thinking.  "Scarecrow Man?" she mused.  "What about the tin man?"

Hmmm.  The tin man.  Well . . . .

There are some big boxes in the garage and a can of gray spray paint in the basement.  I am thinking this New Millennium Scarecrow Man just might need a companion.  My little Dorothy from Kansas has spoken, and her words are more powerful than those of the Great Oz himself.  The last couple nights, I have drifted off to sleep with Tin Man blueprints running through my head as I contemplate what we might fashion into a makeshift oil can.

My small plastic watering pitcher is showing real possibilities.  " Hurry up, next weekend," I think as I become lost somewhere along the road of yellow bricks running through the field of my own dreams.