Why I Love Halloween

I never was allowed to Trick-or-Treat as a kid.  My parents did not like the concept of sugar, I grew up in a small mountain town where it was a pain to go house-to-house, and I think my parents used the excuse that people were tampering with candy and putting razor blades in apples.  Considering I was highly unmonitored as a child, the last excuse seems particularly flimsy.

Regardless of the reason, I have never actually gone door-to-door as a kid and as a result saw no point in dressing up and someone sadly, I do not recall a single costume I wore as a child.  Not one.

As a teacher I did dress in various historical costumes to play along.  I dressed as Rosie the Riveter, Lara Croft, Marie Antoinette, and a handful of others but I just never really liked dressing up.

My children have changed my mind on Halloween for the following reasons:

1) Bridget has alerted me to the joy that can be had in costume construction and the fun in planning elaborate schemes for dressing up.  Each year we go to the fabric store, look over the patterns, check out beautiful fabrics, and spend way too much money sewing something that a small child in Asia could make for 1/18th the price.  But we have such a fun time with the project, sitting together in the living room and talking while measuring, stitching and then using the seam ripper because I sewed something backwards, and then restitching.  This year it was the Red Queen:

2)  Trick-or-Treat?  FUN.  It isn't about candy for me, it is about walking around your neighborhood and seeing people you love!  Gillian took Meg's hand and "trained" her on how to Trick-or-Treat.  They held hands, they ran together, and in general there was glee abounding.

3)  Even my son, who like his mother does not enjoy dressing up, gets into the craftiness of it all and we were able to construct a hat together.  Great geometric thinking came with it, we talked through the two dimension turning into the 3, we calculated diameter, and problem-solved together in generating this velvet top hat.  He of course refused to turn it to the side so the ribbon would be properly viewed. 

I never wanted to have a bunch of kids, but days like Halloween I reflect and wonder how sad it would be to live a life childless.  The wonders of surburbia could never be unearthed.













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