Our First Halloween

Today Veda and Linus’s Halloween costumes arrived in the mail courtesy of Nana. This is a big deal.

Christmas has to be everyone’s favorite holiday, but my personal close second is Halloween. Playing dress-up, all the candy you can eat, spooky stuff, and carving pumpkins… what’s not to like? But after a certain point in your life, Halloween, a holiday that like most others is centered around children, becomes a bit hollow and difficult to celebrate if there are no little ones around. For this reason, Halloween, which had previously been one of my favorite days of the year, became sort of… depressing. I could dress up, but go where? Do what? I had to go to work the next day, and I didn‘t associate with people who threw adult-type parties anymore. A couple of years ago I decided to take Halloween by the reins and put Mimi in a doggie Tinkerbell costume so we could participate in the costume parade in the little town we lived in. When we got there, we were the only human-dog pair. Everyone else in attendance was, of course, either a parent or a child. It was humiliating. We left before it actually started, because it would have been more pitiful to have actually participated.

But here I am, back in the business of my almost favorite holiday. We’re too little for trick-or-treating, and I’m afraid that’s a tradition that’s on its way out anyway. (What’s up with that?!) This year we’ll dress up, go to a kiddie party, maybe go to a fundraiser in our costumes, and probably stroll around the neighborhood. The babies will never remember it, but there will be plenty of pictures. It feels good to be eligible to play in the game.