Halloween, my favorite holiday of all holidays, ever since I was little. Everything about being a child is wrapped up in Halloween, and returns on this day once every year. It does not require the innocence and belief of extreme youth like Christmas, or the lesser holiday of Easter, with an over-sized bunny and baskets for chocolates. It doesn’t even have religious requirements, like its main competitors. Halloween is not observed. It is participatory. There are no invitations. Everyone is automatically included. All you need is to want to be a part of it. It requires next to no money. No one can be excluded because they couldn’t afford it, and have to rely on the kindness of strangers, and the Salvation Army. There isn’t even special weather required like there is to make sense of Santa’s heavy winter clothes and sleigh, although a scent of autumn in crisp air helps.
It is a sensual holiday, involving age appropriate senses. The long, and maybe boring, if you didn’t enjoy the privilege of going to camp, summer comes to and end with the excitement of the trip to the store for a new pair of school shoes and new clothes because you have grown, and not just in size, but in social awareness and fashion sense. A new lunch box to replace the embarrassing one, or maybe no lunch box because you are going to graduate to paper bags and a lunch money for pizza days. Do they still exist?
I can still smell the cafeteria blended with the tastes on the tongue. Breaded fish patties, toasted cheese, floppy hamburgers with the color steamed out of them resting in their Wonder buns with bright red ketchup. Mushy canned vegetables and the scent of a hundred of pints of milk against the lingering background odor of floor cleaner, all in the vaguely humid weather system of a large room full of kids. Outside, the air smells of falling leaves and damp soil, and something slightly sharp in the nose, suggesting the possibility of snow soon, and apples, the promise of their tart sweetness, and cider.
The wind comes up and rustles the dry leaves on their branches, sending them scuttling across the grass and pavement, a vague moan of the larger branches and the scratching sound of the little ones. Voices calling out and murmuring in quiter conversation, squeals and laughter sounding against the brick walls punctuated by the bid windows onto rows of desks and walls covered with colored construction paper art and blackboards. Cupboards of paste, glue, scissors, pipe cleaners and macaroni. Shelves of globes and shadow boxes, a hamster, books. The rubber balls bounding off the pavement and slapping against hands in games of Four Square and Dodge Ball. The rhythmic creaking of the chains of the swings accompanying the rising and falling sing-song of the chants against the shrill metal squeaks of the turning, turning roundabout and the teeter-totters.
The clouds darken, and light shines brighter through the windows, calling us inside, where the excitement of our store-bought or home-made costumes, the basins of water and apples for bobbing, the bowls of candy corns await, and then we get to climb in the buses and go home, where our parents will divide up the tasks of handing out the candy and accompanying us through the darkened neighborhood to trick or treat. My father did that. I have to assume my mother handed out the candy. I never considered that.
Somehow, we never needed coats, although our costumes were flimsy. Laybe a layer of ski long underwear (finally!). I can scarcely remember mine. A devil once. Never a princess. My mother would have rather seen me dead than see me dressed in pink, let alone as a princess. A prince, maybe. I was probably a cowgirl one year. I had probably recently visited Frontier Town. Fallen leaves scurried away from our feet. They wind carried the smell of flames licking pumpkin flesh as the tops burned.
Our fathers’ presence and our own excited voices tamed the sounds of the wind and the nervousness of knocking at certain darkened, forbidding houses, and they were always the same ones, into a pleasantly thrilling level of fear. our bags grew heavy with the candy we desired, and candy that some persisted in giving out, despite its lack of appeal and popularity. This made so little sense. It provided the earliest opportunities to wonder about perversion. it wasn’t even especially associated with the uninviting houses. This made Halloween also an intellectual and philosophical exercise, invoking a certain sophistication in feeling and thought. Issues of gender association — don’t think we children of the 1960’s weren’t aware of gender roles their idealized binary quality — and fear, pleasure and the perversion of pleasure.
My child arrived just in time for Halloween, which made sense of his birth and presence in my life. He would bring Halloween back to me and I would offer it to him. In the collection of things people had offered us, there was a black and grey-spotted white fuzzy pyjama, complète with a good and possible black ears. I made him a carnival of gold paper ai found in the office, tying strings through holes on each side to hold it on his 5-week-old head. He found this acceptable. I put it in our bag and headed across and uptown to catch MetroNorth home to Riverside to take him out Trick or Treating. We’d go to the homes of friends and neighbors to show him off and say hello, posing for pictures I never saw.
His Halloweens were opportunities fr me to showcase my costume-making skills. Having once made my own clothes, I set out to create incomparable versions of Max from Where The Wild Things Are and a black wool flannel Dracula cape with red satin lining and a high collar another. The next year, he wanted to be Darth Vader, and we shopped for the costume. He was 6, and we had moved across town to a larger apartment. We went to our old neighborhood for a Halloween party and to Trick or Treat with his friends, and it was a disaster. An incomprehensible failure. We were at a loss to save the evening. The mask, this one I didn’t make, did not fit his face as the very first one I made him 6 years earlier had. He couldn’t see, he couldn’t breathe. There was no compromise. He wasn’t Darth Vader without it. His friends continued ahead. His Halloween was over, and mine shriveled and died. We aborted mission and went home, frustrated and disappointed.
But, there were others, and when he was 11, we were in France. Everything was there for the same autumn, except Halloween. But the first vacation of the school year is le Toussaint, or All Saints’ Day. We were gathered at my inlaws’ big old house up on the ridge above the Loir, surrounded by forest and filled with cousins, and I had an idea. We’d make a French Halloween.
My brother-in-law, however, however, was not having it. He didn’t want French culture overridden with more American commercial holidays, especially not one that challenged Catholic traditions. He was alone in that, though. Halloween looked likt too much fun. I explained that it does not involve killing chickens, and then that it actually has a connection to Christianity, ia connection to the holiday the kids were on vacation to celebrate, if they thought about that as much as some of their parents. On May 13, 609 AD Pope Boniface IV dedicated the Pantheon in Rome to all Christian martyrs and established the Catholic feast of All Martyrs Day in the Western Church. Pope Gregory III expanded it to include all the saints, too, and moved it to November 1.
More than that, it was French holiday, really, as an usurpation of the original Celtic holiday Samhain that celebrated at this time of the year some 2,000 years before the Catholic Church thought you christianise it. The Celts had settled in Northern France (la Bretagne, where the family had mostly lived), along with practically everywhere else in Europe.
Halloween acceptable, as long as I the party was accompanied by a lesson, and that there would be no going door-to-door. Fine. My husband and I went to every local supermarket, looking for pumpkins to carve, and finally found some practically in the shadow of the cathedral in Chartres, in the zone commercial near the highway, and candy for the hidden treat bags they’d find in a chasse au trésor (très français). His wife and kids turned the Jack ‘O Lanterns into the heads of recumbent scarecrows with their jeans and sweatshirts. How did they know about this?
In the years since, and with the spread of the Internet into France, like Tunisia and Egypt, who had their Arab Spring, French children found out about this going door-to-door, and jumped in with both feet, their parents’ enthusiasm and my encouragement. Every year, our village sees an outpouring in creativity in make-up and assembled costumes, mostly home-made, including the parents. My candle-lit carved pumpkins are a smashing (heh heh) success. A couple years ago I was away on Halloween. I’m still not over that. Last year, I skipped carving the pumpkins. I didn’t have time. The neighbors’ teenage son mentioned it with regret, and I was crest-fallen. Never again.
Yesterday, I finished days of work on the plans, met the builder and was hitting the ground running to prepare to have friends to dinner . There had been small pumpkins at the U Express. That would be good enough. When I got back to get them, there were just two left, one very misshapen. My motherhad taught me to reject those. I turned it in my hands and saw that it could do. The neighbors' son noticed. We share Halloween now, too.
I handed the candy out through the grill in the window of the petite salon, like my private balcony onto Halloween, running back and forth between it and the kitchen. That room is dark. The electricity doesn’t work in that part of the house. Onto the widow I stuck three post-it notes instructing them to frappez svp.
Up out of one group of kids, one little boy with a monkey wrench jammed down into his fuzzy hair looked at me and asked, “Don’t you have electricity?” I laughed.
“Well, it’s not working. We’re going to have that fixed soon.”
He considered that and asked, “Aren’t you afraid to live in the dark?”
“No,” I laughed and added, “we have candles. It’s actually very romantic.” His older sister, who also had a monkey wrench in the lovely soft fuzzy hair on her skull, seemed to appreciate that. I forgot to make it clear that the WHOLE house was not plunged into darkness.
Later, two older girls knocked. I called out HAPPY HALLOWEEN!! from the dark so they would know I was there.
“You are American?”
“Yes, and French.” I realized that she was still too young to maybe know that not so long ago, kids did not go Trick or Treating, and that Halloween was frowned upon. I told her. She looked from me to somewhere up the street and then her friend before saying, “I know. But Halloween is fun. We get dressed up and we meet friends and people, and we laugh and have a good time.”
Those were my exact words to my brother-in-law 17 years ago.
And now, parents tell me about a godfather who lives in Dallas, who learned French and came to France for Mylène Farmer. Another of her family in Chicago, and how visiting them made her want to work in linguistic exchange programs; she bought her own company recently. Another, colleagues of my husband’s, had their two young grandsons with them. They are back from four years in Washington, DC. I told them I had lived there, too, and asked the older boy what he liked best there. He didn’t miss a beat, “The Art Museum of San Francisco.”
A young black girl asked me where I lived in the States.
“New York.”
“AH LA CHANCE!” she burst out.
“Yeah,“ I nodded. I was suddenly dying to have them all in a classroom.
The parents instructed their children to say “thank you”. We said, “Bye!! Happy Halloween!”
A boy asked, “Do you speak French and English on Halloween?” Like maybe that is a special thing I do for the holiday, or a trick.
And, my son and his whole office celebrated Halloween, wearing movie villain themed costumes to work and having a party at a bar the company, Le Slip Français, rented. I’ll leave you to guess which one he is. Hahaha.
Happy Halloween à tous.
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