now that it’s over and done with it, i’ve regained the emotional stability to talk about halloween and how i’m not a fan. people are always shocked b/c the creativity element seems so emily-appropriate. costume ideas, craft projects, the yearly innovation challenge, of course these are all appealing. but not even those aspects can take away the negatives of halloween as a holiday. and by negatives i pretty much mean just the one negative. and that negative is the halloween phenomenon that i like to call “the spook factor.”
the spook factor refers to that jittery, rattled feeling you get in your heart and stomach and even your whole circulatory system when something startles you. symptoms are minor heart palpitations, sweat prickles, and a general feeling of discomfort washing over your mind and body. camp people, you and bob ditter may associate and classify the spook factor with a loss of control, which we all know is risky. for those of you who don’t know bob ditter, first of all, you’re missing out, and now that i think about it, his demeanor kind of elicits the spook factor in me every time i watch his video. hmm.
anyway, i remember the halloweens of my childhood. i remember sitting in the classroom in elementary and middle school all day with that “ican’twaitican’twait” feeling in my stomach and my foot tapping incessantly with anticipation. i always liked the way halloween actually seemed to be longer than other ordinary days b/c you would go to school during the day, do homework and watch tv all afternoon, but after sunset, instead of just eating dinner and going to bed, a whole new event commenced. and i liked that the event involved dressing up, taking pictures, and going out with all the other kids in the neighborhood. it was like a community event. and i got to gallivant around with my best friend.
since the street i lived on until high school only had five houses, including my own, every year my mom drove me, and usually my brother, over to walnut grove to go trick-or-treating with laura and sometimes her older brother and zack, too. laura’s street was endless. there was a big loop of house after house after house, and i loved that, not b/c it meant there was more candy to collect, but b/c it gave us a good reason to stay out later. the first time our moms let us go out alone, i was so excited that i think i documented the event in my diary.
i never dressed up as something scary. when i was really little, probably my first halloween costume ever was a red, yellow, green and blue polka-dot clown suit that my mom made for me. it had red yarn pompoms and rick-rack along the edges. my little brother later inherited the clown suit and got a lot of use out of it. he added his own personal touch by accessorizing with a pink panther mask. but oh, wait, he never actually wore that outfit on halloween.
i think my favorite year was when i dressed up as a gypsy fortune teller. my mom sewed a skirt and a kerchief with hot pink fabric with black polka dots and i found big faux gold hoop earrings and (this was my idea) wrapped the exterior of my trick-or-treating pumpkin in white tissue paper so it would resemble a crystal ball. i decided to add some dialogue to the image and i wrote myself a script on an index card so i wouldn’t forget to say, “you vill lif a long life” or “you vill vin a lot ov money.”
all in good fun, right? oh no, you’ve forgotten the spook factor.
there was the year that the girl scouts drove down to six flags great adventure for the weekend. halloween was approaching, so the park was going all out on the fright fest theme. the first thing i saw when we walked through the gates was a tall skinny man on stilts with wild hair and an ashen, emaciated face. he crept toward us and reached out with spindly fingers. later that night, jill persuaded me to go on the skull mountain ride, throughout which i screamed, “i’m going to kill you, jill elizabeth rumpf!” that wasn’t at all related to halloween, but the nauseating association couldn’t have helped much. then we took a haunted hayride, which probably would have been fine, except that we rode with a bunch of older guys who immediately picked up on my nervousness and supplemented your basic ghosts in the trees and dead prisoners in chains by repeatedly whacking the end of my bench so they could see me jump 2 feet in the air. by the time mrs. rumpf pulled me over to sit next to her in the middle of the wagon to get me away from the big bad boys and to protect me from the creepy hands reaching through the railings, it was too late. it was a miracle i slept that night, on the floor of the season pass office.
another really scary event occurred my freshman year in high school when my english teacher, the infamous jennifer giotis, who on at least one occasion referred to me as “the little deaf girl” and always turned on closed captions when we watched books-gone-movies in class, asked everyone individually what they were doing for halloween. when i admitted that i didn’t have any plans, she decided to petition the whole classroom for some suitable trick-or-treating companions. yeah, she actually announced that i didn’t have anything to do that night, and asked if anyone would be so kind as to invite me along to participate in whatever they had planned. it was humiliating! but i ended up hanging out with julie lavender, who was also hanging out with lauren, who lived near me and was on my new bus route and in my history class, but who i hadn’t gotten to know very well yet, and we had such a good time. this little old, potentially foreign woman lived in the first house we stopped at, and as we walked down her front steps and went to cross the yard, she called out, “watch out for the hole in the meedle!” b/c there was a rather deep ditch in the middle of her yard. classic, classic lek & elw moment. we still talk about it.
but i know exactly the very moment that defined the spook factor. one year, after we carved the pumpkin and lit the candle, my dad took it out in the dark and held it up so it looked like a floating jack-o-lantern head. he danced around with it way out in the front yard and my mom and i watched from the window. at first i loved it. it was that same spooky feeling, but in a good way. i think i made him go back outside for a second round that night, and i know i asked him to “do the pumpkin dance” every halloween after that. but as a little kid who didn’t know any better, i don’t think i realized how spooky it really was. the way it moved and the way the candle flickered out there reminded me of giant muppets, which are probably the one thing that scares me most in the world. those big, shaggy, googly-eyed muppets that dance spastically and kind of wriggle as they sneak around, usually without the good muppets even knowing they’re there. even though i knew it was really just my dad being goofy out there, i could still get absorbed in the pumpkin dance and end up really frightening myself.
i finally told my mom the truth about my halloween sentiments last year as the holiday, if you could call such a horrific day a holiday, was approaching. just in time for her to find the exact opposite of a scary card to send to me at school. and i loved it. seriously, probably one of the first times in a few years that halloween was okay for me. and this year’s card was even cuter. it says, “this little ghost is trying hard to scare you a ‘BOOOO!!’ but when he sees how sweet you are…it comes out ‘i love youuuu!!’” it was really therapeutic to imagine this little smiling ghost with tiny little hands saying ‘i love you’ and actually being amused. i couldn’t believe i was able to laugh at something halloween related. boo! oh, wait now, i startled myself with that one. aww, now it’s not fun again. oh well, maybe next year.
quote of the day: “he says, ‘baby i think you need a long vacation,’ i say ‘i think i could use a little levitation’” – marry me jane
love always, em locke
