💾 Archived View for tilde.club › ~winter › gemlog › 2024 › 11-01.gmi captured on 2024-12-17 at 11:09:46. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Hallowe'en is - truly, honestly - maybe my favourite holiday of the year. Sure, there's Christmas, with its time off work, and seeing family. But I guess in that case, I like what happens on the holiday more than the holiday itself. I haven't been Christian since I was an Anglican as a teenager, so the religious aspects don't resonate with me anymore. It's a time to get together, relax, maybe drink too much. But Hallowe'en remains special to me, an echo of an earlier time, both mine, and ours collectively.
I'm too old to go trick-or-treating (I keep hoping for an attitude shift, and roving bands of adults dressed as pirates and tigers going around with pillowcases full of candy), don't have a kid to go trick-or-treating with, so we always stay home and give out candy. Originally "whatever's cheap at Costco" (which some years was packs of mini-cookies, some years chips...), we've since settled on being the Cool House that gives out full-sized chocolate bars. 81 this year. The number's been climbing steadily.
Our old house was a little post-war bungalow close to the river, to two of them, nestled halfway between, each a couple minutes' walk away. The area at the time a mix of young families and older residents who've lived there their entire life. I loved the area but found Hallowe'en frustrating - a lot of people on our street would just turn off their lights, and one year, it was just us as the lone house on a dark street. That year, we had two kids show up, but one of them was utterly delighted to see our dog in costume. "Did you know your dog is a lion?!"
To be three and full of wonder.
Here, Hallowe'en night is better - the first year after we moved in, we had about as many kids as we usually did at the old house, but that was maybe to be expected. We were at the northern, unbuilt edge of the suburb, almost half the houses on our street yet to be started. More established candy routes to the south. But the numbers have crept up, steadily. Apart from 2020, they've ticked up a bit, year by year. 35, 52, 72, and now 81.
The kids in costumes are always great (though, my partner says ruefully, ours were always homemade), but this year there was an added bonus. The weather, suspended somewhere between cold and pleasant, had a couple families giving candy out on their front lawn, chairs huddled around portable fire pits, flames leaping up into the night, buckets of water nearby. Something about looking out and seeing small fires was perfect.
We couldn't do this, though. We have dogs, and not the best-behaved variety. When they see shadows by the front door, they bark. When someone knocks at the front door, they bark. And so my white-faced old dog hung out at the edge of the living room, full of his usual misgivings, while my energetic younger dog sat behind a baby gate in front of the stairs, letting every group of interlopers have it.
All of us dressed up, of course. My partner as Dorothy, myself as a pretentious poet (turtleneck, pipe, notebook). My older dog a pirate, wearing a sweater with skull and crossbones. My younger dog a bull, wearing a little set of horns and a saddle with a rider hanging on for dear life. No theme, but who needs one? We gave out candy, ate Chinese food, watched Nightmare Before Christmas and the Garfield Hallowe'en special. Replaced candles in the wine bottles throughout the house until, sometime before nine, it had been ages since the last kid, and we turned out the lights, snuffed the candles, curled up on the couch, and split a Coffee Crisp.