The Real Reason Why Halloween Is The Best Holiday

Halloween has gone through many changes since I was a kid.  Each year, we'd go to K-Mart and pick out a costume that came in a box with a see-through cellophane cover that showed the mask inside.  Mostly, the masks were of characters from TV -- Bugs Bunny, Huckleberry Hound, Cinderella.  Also inside the box was a long, sheet-like costume made of silky polyester that you wore over your clothes.  If you didn't wear a costume that came from a box, it was assumed your parents couldn't afford one.  In that case, if you were a girl, you'd put on a dress, some of your mom's gaudy jewelry, and you'd go as a gypsy.  If you were a boy, you'd wear some ripped clothes and smear black make-up on your face and go as a bum. 

These days, it's the opposite.  Homemade costumes are expected, and they are often very elaborate.  If you wear a store-bought costume today, it means you didn't go through the effort to buy the material, sew it yourself, and then shop for all the accessories that go with your costume, eventually  becoming both time-consuming and pricey!

But the biggest change of all that has happened to Halloween is not the costumes but the fact that somewhere along the way adults have claimed the holiday for themselves!  I spent my first few years of adulthood not celebrating Halloween at all until one year, a friend asked me what I was going to be  for Halloween! "Be? I don't go Trick-or-Treating anymore," I answered.  "No, not for Trick-or-Treating, which party are you going to and what are you going to dress up as?" Suddenly, there was this pressure to find a costume again!

My friend Lauren and I did dress up for a college Halloween party one year.  She was a movie star and I was punk opera diva Nina Hagen.  While Lauren did our make-up, she told me that Halloween was actually her favorite holiday because it was the only holiday where she could just go out and have fun and not miss her mom.  Lauren and I had the common bond of losing a parent as a teenager, and it was true that every other holiday consisted of family gatherings and dinners, and every other holiday was tainted with the sadness of us being aware of our missing family member: Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter are all geared towards eating and gathering with family but no one has ever had a big Halloween dinner for their family (not yet anyway!).  After college, Lauren and I began the tradition of sending each other Halloween cards every year with only the two of us knowing the special reason behind it.  This is why Halloween is the best holiday. 

Lauren and I have not sent each other Halloween cards for the past several years because, just like Halloween, our lives are constantly evolving.  This year, instead, I'll be sure to send her a special "Happy Halloween" E-Mail or a Spooky Facebook Message!

Bedtime Stories

In the latest Vanity Fair issue, Courtney Love says she thinks one of the reasons her 19 year-old daughter is estranged from her is because she never read to her as a child.  It surprises me that Courtney didn't read to her daughter because usually artistic people like books.  It's important to read to your kids as part of their bedtime routine.  Nowadays, a lot of kids have TVs in their bedrooms and use that to get themselves to sleep.  We have a "No TV In The Bedrooms" rule in our house.  That's not to say we don't watch TV.  The TV is pretty much on all day, every day.  I remember a friend of mine telling me that she recently read about a  family who had the TV on for more than 8 hours a day!  "Oh, we do that," I said.  "It's not that we just sit there and watch it all day, but it's on all day."  It was the same when I was a kid.  But I didn't have a TV in my bedroom back then either. My parents read to me every night.

First my mom would come in, and I'd get to pick one of my books from my bookshelf.  Then my dad would come in, but he preferred to make up his own stories or to tell me condensed kid-friendly versions of  his personal favorites.  Considering that his two favorite books were Joyce's "Ulysses" and Melville's "Moby Dick," I guess "The Runaway Pancake" was not really entertaining enough for him.

This has become part of my family history. My dad's cousin, Terry, often tells me about the night she was was visiting and took his place in my bedtime routine while my dad was involved in one of their super-competitive Monopoly games.  I told her then that since she was taking my dad's place, she couldn't read me a story, she had to make one up!  She said she thought, "Make one up?  You have to really work hard for this kid!"

First, he'd ask me to tell him the names of some of the kids in my class, and then he'd make up the story.  I remember one story had a bunch of us in a house that was on fire, but one of the kids got a hose, and we were all running around, but we managed to put out the fire in time.  One night he told me about Steinbeck's "The Pearl," the story of a poor fisherman whose son gets bit by a scorpion, but he can't afford to pay the doctor until he finds a giant pearl that seems to solve all his problems. Of course, it just makes his life worse because he becomes greedy, and the novella teaches us a lesson concerning good vs. evil.  My father's stories usually ended in a lesson of some sort, probably due to the fact that he was a teacher! 

Another night, he told me about Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter."  He said that the lady in the book was being accused of adultery and had to wear the letter "A" on the outside of her dress, over her heart.  Nobody knew which man in town she was unfaithful with.  But of course the man knew, and because of this, he had his own letter "A," but it was on the inside of his heart. Eventually, this caused his heart to die because he kept his secret and all of his feelings of guilt and shame inside of him.  My dad said that everyone always thought the woman had it worse because she had to stand outside being taunted in front of the whole town wearing that big letter "A," but it was really the man who had it worse all along.  I often think of the message of that story when situations come up in my own life. That it's better to let your feelings out than to hide them. I doubt that Dora could give me as good of a lesson as that!