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| three costumes my mother made |
She also decorated the large bay windows in front of our house with light up ceramics that she had painted. Eventually us kids grew older, and she wasn't sewing costumes any longer or taking us out trick or treating. She began to transform the front of her house into Halloween scenes. Each year she went with a theme. She did a Halloween wedding, Aliens (complete with space ship), there was a Pirate ship one year and another years theme was The Headless Horseman from Sleepy Hollow. There is a train station across from my mothers home and people heading into Salem during the month of October would check out her displays and a photo of my parents house usually made it into the newspaper.
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| Headless horseman Halloween display |
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| Halloween wedding display |
My kids usually trick or treated with my youngest sister Angela, we started to trick or treat in my mothers neighborhood after she moved there. We've gone there now for the past 14 years. Halloween night has always been fun. Since I loved my Halloweens growing up, It was always important to me that my kids got to have the same sort of experience.
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| Jeremy as Goldberg the wrestler, Amanda the princess and Angela as Minnie Mouse |
Over the years the older kids moved on. We just had our two youngest girls to take out. Last year Stephanie left us and went with her friends. We were down to one child to take trick or treating.
As Halloween approached this year, I was pretty bummed. I knew that this would be the last year that my husband and I would take our youngest daughter out on Halloween. It made me really sad! With no more kids to take out, what would we do on Halloween? It felt worse to me than when the "Big Santa Secret" had finally been revealed to all the kids in our home.
This year we went to Savers in search of costumes. I always liked to try and come up with a good costume for the kids before I resorted to buying something prepackaged and overpriced. The girls wanted to paint their faces as Day of the Dead Sugar Skulls. Stephanie found a dress but we weren't having the best luck with finding one for Alyssa. Then I saw they had old wedding dresses that had been sprayed with black spray paint. These were legit wedding dresses for $15!
We got it and I was much happier. I had all these ideas about how FUN this year was going to be for the kids. I worked on Alyssa's dress and hand sewed it and tried to devise a way to keep it off the ground and prevent her from tripping on it.
The 31st came and I had a few last minute things to do. It should have been quick and easy. Instead, the day started to go down hill for me...
I just wanted to add a flower to pre-existing fascinators I had left over from my sisters tea party bridal shower. I couldn't find the wire cutters to cut the stems off of the fake flowers. I finally figured that out and the glue would hardly come out of the glue gun. It took some finagling but I finally got the hair pieces together. All that needed to be done was to carve my pumpkin.
The pumpkin was a pain in my ass! Of course I picked a huge one, and of course I planned on carving an elaborate sugar skull. Last minute on Halloween I should have just abandoned that idea. I really had nothing else I needed to do so I figured why not? Nothing was going right with it and I was getting aggravated.
Stephanie got home from school and she got her costume on and was all ready for make up. Howie was leaving work early to pick up Alyssa from her Friday after school program. As soon as she came in, I would get her made up and then I'd change and we'd go to my mothers. It all sounded like a really good plan.
Just before I was going to start Steph's make up, my oldest daughter Amanda was sawing her pumpkin and the table shook. A HUGE cup of chocolate milk literally came flying at me. I was covered in milk and so was my iPhone. I started to freak out because there was no case on my phone and it was sitting in a pool of milk. We ran around and got that mess cleaned up and I dried my phone out as much as I possibly could. Too many minutes had gone by. Minutes that should have been spent applying make up.
I ran into stupid problems doing Stephanie's make up. It was trial and error but I thought I did a good job on it. The wasted minutes were adding up and it was getting later and later.
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| Steph |
Steph left to meet her friends while I hurried through Alyssa's make up. Lets just say that Alyssa wasn't as cooperative as her sister was while I was trying to paint her face. We were running late so Howie had to drop Amanda at my mothers. Alyssa's friend was meeting her there at 6. There was no way I could have had Alyssa ready and there by 6 so Amanda had to be there to greet the girl. You would think that we could have just called and told her to come later but Alyssa didn't have her phone number!
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| Alyssa |
Poor Howie was making several trips back and forth from my mothers house. When he came back, I laced up Alyssa's wedding dress and Howie hurried her over to my mothers. She was 30 minutes late. I didn't have time to take a shower so I ran upstairs, grabbed a towel, wet half of it and covered it with soap so I could scrub myself. I was worried I would smell like rotten milk all night. As I am doing this my husband is walking around with the girls trick or treating. It took me less than 20 minutes to clean up, get dressed, brush my hair and slap some make up on. I called Howie to come back and get me. When he got back he grabbed the 4 carved pumpkins we had and put them in the van. As I am about to leave the house, Alyssa called me and was bitching about her wedding dress. She sent me on a wild goose chase looking for a particular shirt that was not there. I gave up looking and grabbed a red dress and ran out the door.
We were driving towards my moms house (which is only a 5 minute drive from ours). As we turned onto her street we found it was blocked off half way down by a cop car with his lights flashing. I got out of the van and started to walk while Howie had to turn the van around and find another way to drive there. I had my heavy camera bag and another with Halloween candy and Alyssa's extra dress. I was out of breath from hurrying. I was pretty much across the street from her house when my mother called me and said that they are almost out of candy. I was about to cry! They were out of candy already? It was 7:20 and Halloween was almost over. People would be shutting their lights off around 8:00. I thought about the police car I had just passed. There was also an ambulance and a person was on a stretcher. That person on the stretcher was having a worse day than I was. I crossed the street to my parents house and dumped the candy in the bowl.
The annoyances didn't end there but I tried not to get upset. It was 7:30 and we were just lighting up Jack o lanterns...It seemed pointless but we had already spent all that time carving them!
It was just one thing after another of things going wrong! All very small and stupid things thankfully. I never got to trick or treat with my daughter, She took her dress off and trick or treated with out it. (I later made her put it back on!) I didn't get the photos I wanted to. I didn't get any group shots with my sister and her kids. We were super late to my brothers Halloween party... It wasn't all bad though. Both of my daughters had a fun night with their friends. They also both had strangers ask to take a picture with them because they loved their costume. So the night wasn't a total failure after all! Later we had a nice time while at my brothers house.
I felt like Karma wasn't done with me yet. I must have done something to someone in a past life? Maybe it was on Halloween?? I woke up in the middle of the night yelling in pain. I had calf cramps from hell. The worst I've ever had and they would not subside. I slowly hobbled into the bathroom, I wet a towel with hot water in the tub and cried as I sat there with it wrapped around my leg. The cramp eventually went away but my leg bothered me the next couple days.
As I've gotten older, Ive learned to try to accept these sort of inevitable disappointments and problems. I can't always plan everything out perfectly. Sure, I can try, but I need to be able to shrug it off when things don't go my way. With a big family, often times things don't go as you hoped and planned. That's just reality. The next day I read that a 13 yr old girl was killed by a train on Halloween night. I cried for her family's loss. Here I was feeling sorry for myself that my little girl was growing up and doing what kids are supposed to do. I felt ashamed.
It's probably normal to miss the past and wish that things stayed the same. I don't know what will become of our future Halloweens. I was never able to sew costumes or decorate for my kids like my mother did for my brothers, sisters and me. Our kids had a fun Halloween every year just the same. My daughters and their friends had a fun night even though I felt like nothing was going right. Oh well, crap happens. Everything could have been so much worse. It wasn't and I am grateful for that. As for the future, I know that we'll figure something out. We'll find our new Halloween tradition. Or more likely, it will find us.
