Spooky

I adore Halloween. It's my favorite holiday. I love when Halloween falls, at the end of October, when leaves are crunchy and changing color, when crispness is in the air, when pumpkin patches seem to pop up at every corner. Like Linus, I anxiously await the arrival of the Great Pumpkin each year.

And I love all Hallows eve itself: Helping my kids dress up, sometimes even dressing up with them, watching them revel in their excitement while mapping out their planned routes so as to snag the most candy. Carnivals, trunk or treats, walking with my kids, laughing the whole way from door to door to door. What could be more fun?

In the shop, too, Halloween signals my busiest time. Orange and black and candy-corn colors fill the shelves, and I busy myself each day making bats and ghosts and pumpkins. Halloween is the time I make peanut butter eyeballs, which sell out quicker than you can say, "Eeek!" Halloween signals the fast-paced fun-filled slide into Thanksgiving, Hannukah, and Christmas, when I can barely turn around I'm so busy.

But...(there always has to be a but, huh?), I do not like the icky side of Halloween, the blood and guts and disgusting part. I don't let my kids go into that Halloween Express store for that very reason. I just don't want them to see all that gore. Yesterday, shopping for costumes, my son Parker lamented, "You're the only mom in the world who doesn't let their kids dress however they want!" And you know, he's right. I don't. (I don't think I'm the ONLY mom that feels this way, though.) Call me old-fashioned, call me a prude, call me whatever you will...but I don't let my sons dress up in all that gory, blood-dripping, ax-murderery mess, and I don't let my daughter dress as a sexy nurse or sexy cat or sexy whatever the costume-makers want to push on tweens this year.

Maybe I'm not in charge of everyone's Halloween, but I am in charge of ours. I heard one parent complain in the party store that all her kids wanted was the scary junk. I guess as they get older they want that stuff. But I think it's all in how you present it, and govern it. We watch scary movies sometimes with the kids, but choose the ones with more suspense, less blood-and-guts. They don't know Jason or Freddy or the Scream guy, but they know Hitchcock and Cujo and some of M. Night Shamalan's stuff. As parents, it's our job to walk that line between what's appropriate and what's not.

And it's the same with costumes. Halloween isn't in itself a bad holiday, as long as you be true to your beliefs. Contrary to how it began, or what some others make out of it, Halloween to us is a celebration of fall, a time for costumes and candy and fun, a time to really enjoy being a kid. You will find that lighter side of Halloween in my shop, and you'll find it our home. If you like all that blood and guts and gore, I'm sure you'll find it (it's everywhere!)...but if you're looking for a pumpkin patch that's sincere in celebrating fun-only, then come on over...I think even the Great Pumpkin would be proud.