FennelFiles

I’ve never been a real fan of Halloween—particularly the dressing up and decorating part. If my grandmother were still alive to read these words, she would don her witch costume, add a nasty wart to her nose, and hobble around behind my back mumbling curses for speaking ill of her favorite day. I do love annual visits to Cool Patch and wandering through the acres of pumpkins. Except for my father-in-law who was a little grossed out by climbing into a pile of dried kernels, how can you not love a good roll through a corn bath?

Every child should be buried in corn at least once. Never mind that kernels end up all over your bathroom floor hours later.

I am sure my apathy for the day stems from the lackluster Halloweens of my childhood. Like most children, I expected lots of loot from my neighbors. We were the only children living at the end of a country dirt road and should have known better than to try and trick-or-treat. None of our neighbors expected us kids to brave the potholes in the dark and knock on their doors. The results were always disastrous. One particularly awful year yielded a mini Almond Joy (I hated coconuts and chocolate together), two stale Chips Ahoy cookies, a box of raisins, and a dime. For an eight year old, that’s a tragic haul.

As a parent, (particularly one who over thinks things and puts unnecessary pressure on herself to live up to the expectations created in her head) I had an irrational, preconceived idea of what makes a good Halloween and what makes a bad one. Homemade costumes, festively decorated house, and construction paper pumpkins = good. Store-bought costumes and minimal decorations = bad. It doesn’t help that our town is teaming with families who decorate their front walks with lights and fake spider webs. Construction paper jack-o-lanterns and witches jeer through their windows like little signs of art project success.

In an effort to live up to my expectations, I picked the kids up early from school. I figured we could bake cupcakes and create Halloween artwork—you know, do the same things as the perfect moms in my mind. After tracing a witch and pumpkin scene for Calla to color in, she flipped over the paper and drew her own people with a red marker. Lennon couldn’t be bothered with making anything. My kids didn’t want to make pictures for Halloween, and I felt relieved at their lack of care for holiday crafts. I expect they will have many expectations that I will fail at fulfilling as they grow older. Fortunately, decorating the house into a holiday extravaganza isn’t one of them.

In the end, I decorated a bit. It took me all of fifteen painless minutes to gather together our random Halloween items and rearrange our pumpkins on the front porch. I collected our black velvet spider web from the work bench and hung it in our front window, set out a tin witch and pumpkin cookie jar on the dining room table, and placed Lennon’s nasty, overgrown spider as the gate keeper to the fireplace.

I may feel apathetic toward the Halloween, but this year I realized I don’t have to live up to my irrational expectations to enjoy the holiday. I was happy to see our jack o’ lanterns glowing from the street in front of the giant black spider web hanging from the window. With Scott’s addition of Bach’s Toccata in Fugue blaring from the garage, it looked like we actually put some thought into the holiday. I still kind of felt a little like a cheater for not making my kids’ costumes. If the store bought Halloween costumes of today resembled those plastic ones they had when I was a kid, I would have pulled out the sewing machine. Maybe next year I will buy myself a witch costume reminiscent of my grandmother’s, sit on my bench outside my house, and scare the bejeezus out of the neighborhood kids—or not. The only tradition I really care about is visiting the pumpkin patch, and hanging out in the corn bath with my kids.

Between Halloween, class parties, and a kid birthday, I’ve baked about four dozen cookies, a dozen cupcakes and two apple pies in the last week. Of all my vegan treats, the almond thumbprint cookies with peach jam filling were the most requested by my kids. The orange jam made these cookies very appropriate for Halloween.