Halloween Spook-tacular

My first memory of Halloween is the year my mother makes a princess costume for me.  She gets a skirt and cape pattern, and then fires up the sewing machine.  This is also the first time I see her sewing. She hunches forward, her foot laying into the pedal like it is a car accelerator.  The machine speeds along the hem of the blue cotton skirt before being readjusted to trace the elastic waist.  

The humming of the needle intensifies as my mother puts the pedal to the floor for straight hems then lets up so she can lean in closer for the turns.    She concentrates solely on the machine, feeding it more fabric as one piece after another is completed.

I sit behind her with my coloring book, nervously turning Donald Duck yellow and worrying that my mother is building an evil scarecrow or monster.

When she finally turns off the motor, she holds up a red cotton poncho.

“There,” she says, out of breath but with a hint of pride, “now Sara can be Little Red Riding Hood.”

Next, she holds up a blue cape that matches the blue skirt she had been working on earlier.  I try it on immediately so she can see how it fits.  

She nods at her work approvingly, but, for some reason, this is the last year she sews Halloween costumes.  

The next year, she cuts two giant circles from poster board and sends me out as an M&M.

When my sisters and I are old enough to trick-or-treat on our own, my mother turns her attention to her role as the door greeter.  For several years, my father poses a dummy dressed as a witch on our front porch.  The dummy’s mask is my mother’s favorite to wear.

It is hideous.  The plastic covers most of her head, leaving just two openings for eyes and two small holes in the upturned snout of a nose.  The face is pale, and severe wrinkles accentuate bright red lips formed into a menacing snarl.  Short wisps of black wig reach out in all directions in a manner reminiscent of Einstein.

As my sisters and I prepare to join the neighborhood kids on the sidewalks, my mother emerges from the basement with a dusty strobe light.  

“Mom, aren’t you going to dress up?” was ask, noticing that she is still dressed in her usual jeans and sweater/turtleneck ensemble.  

“All I’m going to do is wear the mask,” she replies.  She situates the witch’s face over her own and cackles.  About this time, my father moseys by to see our costumes.  

He glances at my mother quizzically and then asks, “Carol, did you get a new perm?”

Without skipping a beat, he moseys right back out of the room before she can answer.

A few hours later, our buckets filled with candy, pencils, stickers, and plastic spider rings, my sisters and I return home.  As we approach the driveway, a group of fifth-graders climb our front steps and ring the doorbell.   

From the street, we watch as the otherwise-dark living room suddenly appears in brief flashes of white light.  Slowly, the front door opens an inch to reveal one eye behind a column of distorted flesh.  As the door opens wider, the witch’s full face emerges, accompanied by the bursts of strobe light that spills onto the crowd on the porch.  

The witch says not a word as she opens the screen door with the same measured pace she used for the first one.  The group of trick-or-treaters shifts uncomfortably on the porch as the door invades their space.  

The witch makes just enough room for her candy bucket and then nods at the kids to take a sucker or piece of packaged sour candy.  Once everyone has gotten something, the witch retreats quickly and slams the door behind her.  A few seconds later, the strobe goes out in the living room, and the front porch light stands as a lone beacon in the night, inviting trick-or-treaters to stop by and earn their candy. 

Several years pass, and “door duty” becomes more of a hassle than entertainment.  By the time my sisters and I have moved out for college, my parents spend Halloween watching television with the lights off.  

When Halloween lands on a Sunday a few years later, my father and I decide that handing out candy might be a fun activity for my mother.  She and I take a quick trip to the grocery store and take advantage of last-minute candy sales.  When I ask my mother to pick out a few bags of what she wants, she points at everything in the aisle.  

“Why don’t we start with one or two things,” I suggest, pulling her out of the way of a speeding cart filled with toddlers and Mountain Dew six-packs.  

“How about this?”  She pulls a five-pound brown bag of M&M’s from the shelf.  

“That’s good,” I reply, taking it from her.  “That’s good, too, because we can eat the leftovers.”

Next, she grabs a yellow bag of M&M’s that was next to the first.  “These?” she asks.

“Maybe we can try something else,” I suggest.  She frowns but does not put the yellow bag back.  

Over the next ten minutes, we negotiate.  Instead of seven bags of M&M’s, which is what she wanted, we settle on two with an additional three bags of mini chocolate bars.  

“Now,” she insists as she pokes her finger into my shoulder, “you are going to take some, too, right?”

“Mom,” I assert for the third time, “these are for the trick-or-treaters.”

As soon as I open the first bag and pour the contents into a dish for visitors, my mother snatches a handful of her favorite kind.  We wait at the kitchen table for a few hours, and every time the doorbell rings, my mother runs to see who is there.  She smiles at the costumes and then gasps when she realizes she forgot the candy.  I hand her the bowl and she holds it out to the kids. 

Sometimes, she grabs a handful and unloads it in their sacks.  Most often, she lets them take what they want, and then as soon as she returns with the bowl, she skims a package or three off the top.  

“Make sure you get some,” she says every time.