“Hmm,” Mark said as we went home. “We didn’t get fine chocolates for ourselves.”
“True,” I said.
He baked gluten-free brownies.
On the pumpkin front, this year is very low key. I gave the single pumpkin I impulse bought last week a jagged lid and carved a skull out of the pumpkin’s thick rind with holes for the eyes and nose. The teeth look a little like a car’s radiator grille. It’s very basic. Sometimes I like it, other times I’m dissatisfied with how crude it feels. In retrospect, I should have drilled holes around its brows and stuck in marigolds.
At least we have a ton of paper bats adorning the walls. Which I like.
Mark has put up the blower-powered Eldritch Horror: large, purple, inflatable, light-up tentacles. It’s under the front rhododendron and behind some plastic old-timey graveyard fencing. It looks very effective, and it’s the one Halloween Thing Mark seems to be into because he wants to order another one for more tentaclely fun.
I wasn’t sure what the night was going to be like, weather-wise. A dense (and possibly freezing) fog advisory for the morning meant a grey pall over everything. The predicted clearing came around 4:30 PM. At least there wasn’t a deluge. Or — thinking back to Minnesota decades ago — snow and dented parked cars.
I set up the long folding table, placed a green tablecloth over it, and set up the wooden skull, the ceramic jack-o-lantern my Aunt Joanne made, the light-up skull candles, the lava lamps, the spiky-winged siren-ladies crystal ball stand, the blue glass orb, and various tea candle votive ware.
I really wanted to set up a cauldron with an old copper punch bowl and our sonic fog machine, but after an hour of searching the garage and loft, I could not locate it. I am sure I saw it over the summer when we were reorganizing the bedrooms, and it is not in any of the places I recall seeing it. Undoubtedly I will find it this week when I’m tearing the house apart looking for something else.
I did find my RollerBlades (and wrist guards), so I threw on my large black-and-purple cloak, put on the RollerBlades, and swooped around the street for a quarter hour. Apparently, the Dragon Dancing I’ve been doing has been good for my balance: my muscle memory kicked in and it felt like I’d been RollerBlading forever instead of only once a year. Real bats did not join me as I glided up and down the street (as they did once, several years ago), but yes, Saint-Saëns’s Danse Macabre was playing in my head. (“Look, Aoife, John’s back. He didn’t need his cell phone to call the ambulance from the middle of the street at all…”)
Our first group of trick-or-treaters appeared shortly after six. Which was a little late; usually the little-little kids are making the rounds by 5:30 PM. “Oh. More Skittles,” one grateful little ghoul said.
Since Aoife was going a little nuts, I figured it would be a better night if the doorbell wasn’t rung too much, so I set up the square card table in the driveway, next to the garage and in front of the skull jack-o-lantern, with a white tablecloth, two white camping lights, and my tarot cards. (Setting up a flood-lit path to a tarot card reading booth in the backyard had been vetoed earlier that afternoon.)
I shuffled and shuffled the cards. I murmured the invocation to the circle and four quarters. I broke out The Book of Art and a pen. I shuffled the cards some more. I heard trick-or-treaters shrieking from several blocks away. I shuffled the cards and attempted to formulate a question. The night grew cold, and so did my hands.
I settled on a nine-card spread and shuffled the cards some more. This was probably a mistake, as the spread I chose is more suited for a yes-or-no answer with temporal cards filling in the why, and I was asking a “how do I” question about community. The most interesting aspect of the reading was that it started with the King of Cups (fire expressed as water) reversed, and ended with the Queen of Wands (water expressed as fire) reversed. Why, yes, The Chariot reversed showed up, too. And the Two of Pentacles, reversed.
I wrote the cards down in The Book of Art; all suits represented, three upright, six reversed. I will need to do more research, but I’m pretty sure the spread was pointing out that “you’re the common factor in all your failed relationships,” and that focusing on one thing might help. And possibly (looks at Seven of Pentacles sitting in the middle of the spread) I’ve confused “community” with “legacy.”
At some point I managed to coerce Cicero — who had managed to sneak out of the house, even though he’s a black cat on Halloween — into my lap and partially under my cloak. We both appreciated each other’s body heat. I gathered up the spread cards, noticed that they had a faint trace of condensation on them, and started shuffling the cards once more for a series of practice readings — two crossed cards over a line of three cards — to flex my cartomancy muscles.
Around 7:45 PM the second group of trick-or-treaters, three little girls, slowly approached the table. “Aw,” one said when Cicero leapt out of my lap and into the shadows of the neighbor’s shrubbery. They were very polite and effusively thankful for the candy loot, and somehow managed to scamper off before anyone could ask for or be offered a one-card tarot draw.
By 8:00 PM, it was clear that no other trick-or-treaters were going to walk by our house. I dismissed the circle and the quarters, pulled up shop, and asked Mark if he wanted to go looking at neighborhood jack-o-lanterns. At first he was happy letting me go by myself, but then changed his mind and we were walking up the hill.
Our street was dark. On the next block we passed by one house with a jack-o-lantern and orange lights, and another house with the resident dog’s dog toys dramatically lit up and hanging from a tree.
We continued to climb the hill and turned the corner onto a dark street. I was stunned. We passed the silhouettes of houses. In the distance, a railing glowed with white and orange lights. We passed an empty porch with a single smiling jack-o-lantern: the piece of its pumpkin grin had been split and stuck on the sides as ears (or horns).
“What the hell?” I asked. In my memory, this street had been Halloween Central, packed with teeming hordes of trick-or-treaters — light-up jellyfish, vampires, witches, Sith, ghosts, fairies, Mario Brothers, pirates, Minions, princesses, X-men, and the occasional sexy werewolf — and homeowners in lawn chairs holding block parties in their driveways. “It’s like someone sucked the Spirit of Halloween out of this town!”
“Well, the Y had a trunk-or-treat party from about five to eight.”
“Trunk-or-treat,” I scoffed. We turned the corner to the apex of the hill. The former Halloween Party Houses appeared to be mostly empty, although there was an axolotl distributing candy to two small trick-or-treaters at one front door. We turned the corner to another empty street.
“Well,” said Mark, “pumpkins aren’t very ecological and their transportation has a big carbon footprint. I could see folks deciding not to do jack-o-lanterns this year.”
“What the hell?” I asked the darkness. Aside from a giant inflatable pumpkin-headed scarecrow, we were the only ones on the street.
“You’ll have to sign up for trunk-or-treat at the Y next year,” said Mark. “You could decorate the car, and it’s a social event and you like people.”
“Ugh,” I said. “Trunk-or-treat is lame — Oh, look, they’ve got a good ghost projection.”
“Traditions change,” Mark said. “And so do neighborhoods; the closest neighbor kids are graduating from high school.” Mark pointed out a car that had been working its way down the street, pausing at any house with a hint of Halloween to disgorge three kids, collect them, and repeat the process five houses later.
“I guess the night peaked at seven?” I hazarded. We passed a house projecting a swarm of multicolored objects that turned out to be witches on broomsticks.
“Let’s go down this way,” I said, hoping to find more Halloween activity on a busier street.
“What the hell?” I said a moment later as the only thing lighting up were the street lamps. A car drove by.
“My poor husband,” Mark said. “People are probably at events downtown. The Eugene Ballet’s fundraiser party is at the Hult Center. And Halloween has become yet another holiday event for adults to drink, like Cinco de Mayo.”
“Win Money! Money! Money!?” I said in my best A Charlie Brown Christmas voice.
“Your decorations are the Most Sincere,” Mark said as we returned home.
I mused on trunk-or-treat to try to pin down exactly what my problem is with it. I vaguely remember it appearing in Octobers about ten to twenty (?) years ago, and thinking it was odd and anemic even back then. It seemed like it was a work-around for extra-rural families who literally lived five miles away from each other — which is fine and I get it — but in urban settings, the replacement of the trek from house to house to five steps to the next car’s trunk felt like an incredibly tame and domesticated consolation prize. A little more research reminded me that it started as a conservative American church movement to replace the folk tradition with something more Godly, transforming it from a mysterious interstitial period to a safe, sanitized, candy distribution event. And it’s occurring to me that trunk-or-treat would be a recommendation side-bar in any October edition of The Fearful Parent Magazine (Informing Parents On Ways Your Child Could Die In Seconds This Month, sponsored by the Baby-Industrial-Military Complex).
I want my Halloween to be a journey about choosing what masks we wear and what masks we take off, and a way to collectively examine our chaotic fears and wishes and desires — the tricks — and the ways we appease and order them — the treats.
And yes, when I was a child, a costume was a cool by-product of collecting tons of candy from the neighborhood (that I’m one hundred percent sure my parents did not pillage).
I suppose I’d do trunk-or-treat if I could do Sexy Trunk-or-Treat (cue Jeffrey’s dad from the movie Jeffrey woodenly saying, “That’s so hot.”).
“So,” said Mark. “Today is All Saints Day, right?” Then he brought out the gilt angels and put them on the mantel.
