February 28th is probably the best day of the year to start a blog about Halloween. Halloween is the best time of year, and the end of February, March, until about late April, is the worst time of year. It's been cold for too long by now, the snow isn't pretty anymore, it's muddy and more than likely a giant mound of it is taking up the majority of a parking lot somewhere and I'm just in a bad mood until the first above 50 degrees day. Halloween on the other hand, makes me inexplicably happy! Even though end of October is nothing but a warning signal of the cold weather months about to come in and darken my mood significantly.
I have always loved Halloween. I loved
the scary movies (but not too scary) shows and movies that always
play at that time of year, the colors, the imagery, the black cat and
pumpkin, the witch and ghost. I love it all. When I was a kid we
never were terribly extravagant during Halloween. One of my mom's
favorite stories to tell is when all she bought me for a Halloween
costume one year was a plastic black mask that only covered the upper
part of my face but I thought it was the coolest thing ever. Even
more of a testament for my love of the holiday. I think my mother
plays a big part in my love for all things Halloween. She has a
not-so-passing interest in the paranormal, and when my sister and I
were kids she used to get these Time Life Paranormal books and Cori
and I would sit on her closet floor without her knowing and flip
through them looking at all the pictures of ghosts and aliens and
Bigfoot, Loch Ness Montster, real life vampires...kind of how
per-pubescent boys find their father's porn stash and flip through it
and try to learn about women and sex....it was paranormal porn. I was convinced all
of these things were real, and that they all came out on Halloween.
Don't get me wrong, I was not a brave
kid, and I am not a brave adult, I still get afraid of the dark
sometimes (“Everything is still where it was when the lights were
on” my brother-in-law recently told me after I told him how freaked
out I was when the power unexpectedly went out the other night.)
Scary movies do scare me. A lot. And I sometimes can't even watch
ghost hunting shows on TV because they keep me awake at night and
afraid to get up and go to the bathroom. I've been in approximately
one haunted house my entire life, and it was at the Minnesota State
Fair and I couldn't wait to get the hell out of it. But, for some
reason, the idea of all the creepy crawly things in my mom's books
being among us one night a year didn't scare me, I loved it. When we
would go out trick-or-treating I looked hard for ghosts (but god
forbid someone answered their door to us wearing a scary mask of some
kind, I would hid behind my sister and cousin for the rest of the
trick-or-treating duration) Halloween was a safe night to be scared
and to be scary and to believe in scary things.
I hold Halloween very dear to my heart,
for countless reasons that I am going to attempt to share on this
blog. I have grown to love and appreciate it even more as an adult,
and now especially as a mother myself. I hope you enjoy it and visit
frequently! I will be updating as much as the Halloween spirit
strikes me, which is quite often!
(Sarah-I promise this time!)
I'm not sure what my favorite part of halloween is - the whole atmosphere, the fact that it's the most fun holiday of the fall time (my favorite season) or all the candy and fun costumes everywhere. I think it's all of the above!
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