I am thankful for Halloween.
The silliness of dressing up as monsters or funny characters right as the world is turning darker and colder and of laughing together, greeting those strangers who come to our door with a smile and a candy, no matter how different or scary they appear.
I’m grateful for the memories I have of my parents and their cousins and my grandparents making the effort to get us costumes and get us cousins together even when trick or treating meant wading in thigh high drifts of snow. Even when the plastic mask steamed up inside and the rubber band holding it on snapped so it came off before the first house, even when the polyester hospital gown type costume of choice was buried under winter coats, even when I tripped and the nice man who gave out whole Coke bottles, got down on his knees and helped me find my tootsie rolls and M&M’s under the snow on his driveway. Grateful for the dentist who gave us crunchy red tablets to stain our plaque covered teeth until we finally brushed enough. Grateful beyond everything, for the years being a struggling, working couple who could never afford candy because Halloween wasn’t payday, but still managed every year to get the costumes and the candy, because if our parents could do it, somehow we could too. I’m grateful for the pumpkin carving and seed roasting and school carnivals and sleepovers that wear me to the bone and finally let me understand how much my grown ups loved us when I was a child -and passed down the traditions they had learned from adults who had learned them as children back uncounted generations and kindly let me pass it on to the kids in my life.
