Happy Halloween!

Some memories and thoughts on this day of sugar overloading

My immigrant grandmother did not understand Halloween. I still don’t completely understand the American enthusiasm for this holiday either. In California, where the Santa Anas whip us up into searing temperatures, it’s all the more difficult to reconcile rotting jack’o lanterns with the sun beating down on them. In a way, I get it: it’s a harvest time thing, a way of honoring the dead, or the portal between life and death, but I have a Chinese superstition about the fake cobwebs and headstones decorating people’s lawns. Really? This is how we make light of the fate that awaits us all? Isn’t it an invitation for the Grim Reaper to pay us a visit? I’m Chinese enough to feel nonplussed by my neighbors’ enthusiasm for fun skeletons and plastic graves with hands sticking out of them.

The part about knocking on doors and demanding candy also puzzled by grandmother, who having been very poor and trying to maintain respectability was terrified at anything that hinted of ‘begging.’ She thought Trick or Treating might be a form of begging. We tried to convince her otherwise. (We couldn’t knock our chopsticks against our bowls while eating because not only was this rude, it was the behavior of beggars. We didn’t see beggars on the streets of our leafy suburb, but they were there, in her mind, haunting her).

We were allowed to Trick or Treat finally. I don’t even think my parents bothered to walk with us while we were doing it. I think people still gave out apples in those days because no one had figured out that the some psychopath could put razor blades in them. I remember going through the haul with my brother and sister and eating our way through the candy tin until it was all black licorice. Yuck. I loved those little sugar necklaces for some reason.

Every year, I forget about costumes and dressing up until Halloween morning. When my son was a kid, this was a real problem, but I always managed to put something bizarre together out of the depths of my closet.

In 2008, right around the Wall Street crash, I dressed Leo up as a hobo, with a bundle on a broomstick and some ripped T-shirts. My closet could also provide the accoutrements of a cowboy, punk rocker, a Rastafarian and maybe John McEnroe. In 2016, we set up the Trump Pinata in the front yard and Leo wore a dragon mask and a fake brocade bathrobe to give out candies to kids that came by.

Every year, I look forward to trick or treaters, but our street is mostly made up of empty nesters like us so in terms of trick or treating cost benefit analysis, the space traversed vs. candy collected ratio may not be great.

In any case, Happy Halloween! I really look forward to the next F Scale Reading Group!

I did not get Emmy a costume either, but a friend photoshopped her one!