Halloween Ramblings

Halloween is Saturday and I’m really excited. Halloween is one of my favorite holidays. The candy, the fun, the decorations, the parties, the excuse to dress up in a costume. THE COSTUMES!

I love dressing up in a costume!

I have loved Halloween since I was a child. I’ve always thought it was the start of the holiday season. It makes logical sense. You went from Halloween to Thanksgiving to Christmas to New Years. It is the start of the holiday season and no one can change my mind.

Did you know some of our favorite Halloween activities actually stem from very old traditions? Halloween itself is the celebration of the harvest. It was the celebration people would have right before they would enter the dark times of winter. Back then, if you had a good harvest you celebrated, but you also had the reality of dealing with the extras that you couldn’t use quickly enough and you couldn’t sell. They didn’t have a way to store anything extra, and they didn’t want it to go to waste; they would end up with rotten food and that created the problem of pests.

Most of the small villages back then were charitable to their neighbors as neighbors could mean the difference in life and death . So in celebration of the healthy harvest they would get together, they would have a big feast and bring the extras to share and trade before they all hunkered down for winter.

That’s also where the idea of trick or treating comes from – sharing. Back then they shared in a feast and food, now we share candy and Halloween parties.

Another fun old tradition celebration with Halloween is the idea of costumes. In many cultures it is believed that October 31st and November 1st are days when the veil between the world of the living and dead are thin and those that have passed on can come back and visit. Several cultures also believe that it’s not only your ancestors and good spirits that could come back, but also bad spirits, evil spirits. So you would dress up in a costume to confuse them so they wouldn’t bother you. And if it was scary, you could scare the evil spirits away. That’s where the idea of dressing up comes from.

I always enjoyed Halloween, but it was also special because when I was growing up, my mom loved to decorate for any holiday, but Halloween and Christmas were her favorites. I remember she would ask me the night before, “You want to decorate tomorrow?” and of course I would say yes. I would get so excited.

I loved opening the boxes and pulling out all of the Halloween decorations, and even though I knew what was in there, it was still like finding treasure. I would pull out the decorations, and then she would tell me where to hang what, but as I got older, she started letting me do more on my own.

I still remember the first time she said, “Do you want to decorate for Halloween yourself?” I was in middle school and I felt like the hottest chick on the block, getting to decorate all by myself.

My mom used to love to carve pumpkins and so we would carve pumpkins. It was so much fun and I would always complain about the “guts.”

When I was a kid, Mom and her best friend used to do Halloween parties for family and friends’ kids. I still remember those. They would play games and everybody would be dressed up. Years later we started doing those parties for my kids and our friends’ children to carry on the tradition.

I love decorating for any holiday but Halloween is fun. There are so many fun things about it, and so many fun decorations. The things that normally creep you out during the year, like spiders and snakes and monsters. They’re now fun to put out.

It’s fun to pick out a costume. I enjoy it as much as I did when I was a kid, even more as an adult now. And I have my costume all ready to go for this year. I will be the Queen of the Forest this year. Maybe I’ll catch a good picture and I’ll put it in next week’s piece for you to see.

I plan to go trick or treating with my daughter and my grandbaby, and then off to a Halloween party with friends. I will enjoy one of my favorite holidays.

I will remember my mama, remember how much she loved decorating for holidays and doing parties and celebrating. She always did the holidays big, and I’ve always done the same thing with my kids.

So I wish everybody a very Happy Halloween and a happy beginning to the Holiday Season. I hope the next few months don’t drive you crazy. I hope they leave you feeling blessed and happy for the New Year, very soon to come.

But most of all I hope you don’t end up broke after Christmas is over.

Elizabeth Graves lives with way too many animals and not enough sanity. She is passionate about the arts, especially theatre.  And she enjoys any reason to dress in a costume.