Halloween.  It’s always been my favorite holiday.

I never liked carving pumpkins.  I didn’t like scooping out the pumpkin guts after school on Halloween when I was a little kid.  It was usually a little chilly out and the slimy seeds made my hands hurt.  I never quite liked the faces I carved.  I didn’t think they were good enough.

My mother, however, made Halloween spectacular.  She had an old, antique dress form that she would put out on the front porch of our house that she dressed up as a witch in her old clothes.  There was a large, antique cauldron that was dragged out from the back yard and placed in front of the witch.  She would get the not-so-fresh produce out of the fridge and throw it into the pot with water to make a “soup”, then float marshmallows all over the top that had eyeballs drawn on them.

Somewhere she managed to find a Robert Redford record album of wolf calls that was put onto a turntable in the living room window.  Wolves repeatedly howled over and over again.  It was just plain cool.

Usually I had a sheet over me with holes cut out for eyes like Charlie Brown.  Sometimes I was a witch.  A witch or a ghost were my go-to’s.  With an old pillow case as my candy bag, I was set and ready to go trick or treating.

There was that one house in the neighborhood everyone was terrified of.  Mrs. Breen’s house.  She had an overgrown front yard and a dilapidated house.  Everyone said she was a witch and that she baked rat hair into the cookies she left on a plate on her front porch for the children to take.  No one took them.  As I look back on it, Mrs. Breen was probably a nice lady.  I feel badly that no one took those cookies.

When I got home from trick or treating, I’d dump my bag out onto the floor to sort out the good stuff from the not so good.  Big candy bars, of course, were the good stuff.  The candy pillowcase lasted for a few weeks.  I’d have some candy after school every day until the not so good candies got tossed.

Halloween was exciting and mostly, creative.  It was a way to temporarily not be myself and be something else, instead.

Happy Halloween!  Go out and be creative.

From the cemeteries of New Orleans, Louisiana