Post Halloween

 I am working on a post about this year's Halloween, which I am sorry to see go (Halloween, that is, not the post I'm working on). But in the mean time, and in the very possible event that I don't finish that post, here is one from 2008 that summarizes the way I feel today:

I feel like I do in January after the holidays are over. I love Halloween--I think I like it even better than Christmas because there aren't weeks and weeks of programs and ads and products devoted to it. And the pressure to get along with your loved ones isn't as cloying. (Loving people seems to have so little to do with getting along. There are people I get along with fine, but don't love at all, and then there is my two year old, who today told me he wasn't talking to me anymore. And he didn't, until he wanted candy.)

But also, Halloween is the most creative holiday of all of them, and I think that's why I love it the best. I love the costumes and the black cats and all the great stuff you can make. I love the way you spend an evening knocking on your neighbor's doors and sometimes visiting for a few minutes. In honor of it, Tommy and I took half the day off and spent all of it quietly working on projects. Tommy made tank engine costumes for Liam and Dawson out of cardboard boxes (Liam was James, Dawson was Thomas) and I made hors d'oeuvres shaped like mummy and cat heads.

Then we went out trick-or-treating and had a post trick or treating party at our house that included five adults and six children (all under ten.)
The next day my house looked like Keith Richards and Mick Jagger drank ten bottles of vodka and got into a fistfight. Seriously. Thomas and James lay on their sides on the floor, the couch was dismantled, (although at least no one put mustard on it--see "At least he's a polite neanderthal" post ) candy wrappers were everywhere, tables were overturned. Give six children a pile of candy and let them run around while you sit and have just the tiniest glass of wine with your friends, and it's like having a frat party in your dining room.

But now everything is clean and the decorations are down, and the leaves have mostly fallen off the trees. The Gurches have already dismantled the haunted house they do each year for the whole neighborhood. I feel a little bereft--like all I have to look forward to is egg nog.