I love Halloween. I love holidays in general, but I love Halloween especially. It's my third favorite, after Thanksgiving and Christmas. But what's special about Halloween is that it's the first in a group of fantastic holidays after a long dry spell. July 5 is one of the worst days of the year because we have to wait so long before another holiday.
So, in honor of this glorious day that is upon us, I have decided to write some random thoughts about All Hallow's Eve.
Duration. I consider the Halloween season to last from September 15 through October 31. This is an arbitrary date, but that's how I do it. In the past I've had peculiar and elaborate guidelines for bumping the date up, but I've decided to keep it at September 15. This year I noticed an interesting pattern. I noticed a few houses that had their Halloween stuff up in early September. But the stores this year put their stuff out later than they have in the past. Strange!
Colors. Orange and black is a very Halloweeny color combination. I do not like it, therefore, when I see a recent trend in adding purple and green to the Halloween color scheme. I can see purple; I find it a little spooky. But the purple and the green is just going too far. If you take the black out, you have Easter colors! I think they may be fitting in some situations. Green and black can be an eerie combo on their own. For example, I have a pillowcase that's black with green bats, and it's awesome. But I don't like green and purple being thrown around with the same priority as orange and black. I think orange, black, and white is a much better combination than orange, black, purple and green.
Goodies. Those of you who know me know that when it comes to desserts and candies, I only east seasonal things. So after months of having nothing but popsicles (which end with August anyway), I'm glad to be able to eat unhealthily again. I get to eat year-round desserts with a seasonal twist (for example, donuts with fall-colored sprinkles or ghost-shaped sugar cookies), but I also get to eat uniquely Halloween things. Candy apples. Candy corn. And anything pumpkin--pumpkin shakes, pumpkin egg nog, pumpkin cookies, you name it.
Shows. I currently own twelve Halloween shows, and I watch one a day for the last twelve days of October. I have The Munsters' Revenge (a 1980s TV reunion movie), The Nightmare Before Christmas, Frankenweenie (an early short Tim Burton film), It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, seven Halloween episodes of old TV shows (four of Bewitched, two of The Addams Family and one of The Beverly Hillbillies), and a three-minute episode of the Peanuts Motion Comics Collection.
For me to consider it a Halloween show, it has to actually reference the holiday itself. So scary or eerie or creepy alone just doesn't cut it. Frankenweenie is a bit of a stretch in this regard. It has a bit of a silly, spooky theme to it. In one scene, you can see Halloween decorations in the background. If it were not for those Halloween decorations, I wouldn't add it to my seasonal lineup. Conversely, if there were a scene with those decorations in the background, but otherwise it was not spooky and it did not make more obvious references to the holiday, I also would not consider it a Halloween show.
Of these twelve, the Peanuts clip is the most recent (2008), but it is based on the comic strips of 1964, so it's not new material. So excluding that one, the most recent of those shows is The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993). But despite its young age, it has been a Halloween tradition for me for longer than all the others. My dad got it for my birthday when I turned six in 1994. I remember seeing the trailers for it on TV in 1993 but thinking my parents probably wouldn't let me see it. None of my family had seen it, but it was a worthwhile gift. It's one of our favorites. It's such an amazing movie. I have it literally memorized. I could tell you word for word all the dialogue of the entire movie. (The only rough spot would be that I get some of the lyrics mixed up in "Kidnap the Sandy Claws.") Despite my having seen it a million times, every time I watch it, I notice something I haven't noticed before.
Music. I have some Halloween music I add to my regular playlist. I have the soundtrack to The Nightmare Before Christmas, and I have two versions of Vince Guaraldi's "Great Pumpkin Waltz," the original one from the special and another version from two years later. I also have a little song called "Ghosts," which was a piece from my introductory piano course (so I can play that one!). I have a piano book which contains "The Great Pumpkin Waltz," but unfortunately I don't play so I just have to plunk along.
Memories. You remember my Halloween memory post? I remembered another detail about 1994: We went to my grandparents' that night. I only remember this because I remember that on the way back, a house in their neighborhood had a jack-o-lantern lampshade in the window. Since that time, I've wanted a jack-o-lantern lampshade.
Halloween costume FAIL. If you read the above post, you will note that I conveniently didn't write about my costume when I was 11, since Halloween was a Sunday that year. That's because it was incredibly stupid. At that time in my life, I was very weird and very nerdy. You're probably thinking, "You still are very weird and very nerdy." But no, I was really, really, really weird. At that time, I had a fetish for chess. Which I really don't understand, because I wasn't any good at it. I think I've won one game of chess in my life--and that was a few years after my fetish ended, and it was against someone who'd never played before. But I digress. I was obsessed with chess. So I decided I wanted to be a chess piece for Halloween. Sounds like a reasonable enough costume, right?
I decided I wanted to be a white king. If you've noticed, many chess sets have a cross on the king. So that was my costume. I had a white robe, I painted my face white, had a white hood, and a little cross on top of my head. I actually don't think anyone knew what I was unless they asked. They either thought I was some Christian zealot, or else a member of the KKK. How do I know this? Well, in the school costume parade, someone in my class was the devil with elaborate face paint, and one of the teachers jokingly remarked that I needed to go stand by him. At Boo at the Zoo, a woman--a complete stranger--came up to me and asked me what I was. And then when I was trick-or-treating, a neighbor kid asked me if I was supposed to be a member of the KKK. I think that's what everyone else was thinking. He was just the only one who said it out loud.
And one more thing. I went trick-or-treating with my friend David Christensen. What was his costume? A book. Yes, a book. He was wearing a box that said "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban," which was the most recent of the series at that point. (I actually don't think he had even read that one yet.) So there we were, two bespectacled friends, dressed as a chess piece and a book. Nerd Alert! Nerd Alert!
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I could write a lot more about Halloween. But I'm tired, and you're bored to tears.
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