Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Smells Like Halloween Spirit

Sunday was really cold, compared to the unseasonably warm weather we enjoyed last week, and it made me giddy.  I don't hate hot weather.  Don't get me wrong.  It's less of a hassle going anywhere when you don't have to worry about coats for big people and babies, and shoes, and keeping socks on little feet that think they NEED TO BREATHE!  But this time of year has been my favorite for as long as I can remember.

It feels like once school starts, there's one thing after another to look forward to in the fall.  I'm not going to lie.  I still am excited for the entire month of September, because my birthday's at the end of the month.  Now that my daughter's birthday is at the beginning, my dad's birthday is in the middle, and mine's at the end of the month, we're pretty much covered for celebrations for every other week in September, and I think that's great!

When the NHL isn't locked out, the beginning of October means hockey season's coming.  In the past, since we got our season tickets, that meant we'd go to a hockey game most weekends, either on Friday or Saturday night from October until Christmas.  This beginning part of the season is when everything's all shiny and new. Hope is alive and well that THIS is the year that Lord Stanley's Cup is going to parade down Delaware Avenue in Buffalo.  It doesn't matter if the Sabres lose a game or two here at the shiny, new beginning of the season, because the season's young, and they still have a bazillion more games to play! Granted, NHL fans of all stripes have to imagine this wonderful feeling of uplifting optimism this year, which might be why October is a little darker for this Sabres fan this year.  My game night jerseys hang forlornly in my closet.

But at least there's still Halloween to look forward to!  Then it's not too long before it's Thanksgiving, which as a holiday, I can pretty much take or leave, for many reasons, but I get excited The Day After Thanksgiving, because that's the day we break out the Leg Lamp and put it in the window.  If we don't get the Christmas tree put up, at least it's on the agenda.  If I've bought presents already, I can wrap with glee and set them around the living room to use as decorations!  As long as the Christmas music stays put in the window that opens up the day after Thanksgiving, and then fades out just after New Year's Day, I really like it.  Everything from right about now, Early October, until New Year's is more glamorous, more glittery, more magical.  After New Year's, it's just cold and a long stretch before things get interesting again, really. 

So back to this time of year.  Rozzie and I went out on Sunday, so she could do her constitutional, and I could keep her from chasing the Amish who were parading up and down the road out front, and I caught a whiff of what I think of as Halloween Spirit in the air.  It was cold.  I could hear the trees in the windbreak creak a little.  The farmers have been up in the field on the other side of the windbreak, cutting cornstalks, so there was that smell, faint, in the air.  The wind carried on it a wink and a whisper of "Something fabulously wicked this way comes..."

It makes me smile every year.

See, I don't go for the gory-scary Halloweens that a lot of people over the age of 11 like.  I was never big on horror movies.  By that I mean I avoid horror movies at all costs.  I don't like to be horrified.  I DO believe in ghosts, and I do think the whole idea of them is fascinating, a little unsettling, but not because they're reaching through my television set to suck me into a void, rather because there's so much we don't understand about the darker recesses of our universe.  We know the normal, and things like that walk along the normal and are the stuff of legends and superstitions and stories of things that go bump in the night.

So someone else can do up their house with fake blood coming out of the walls, and zombies grappling up out of the overgrown front yard, and the Dementor-looking grim reapers meant to hang from porch ceilings.  I don't go for rotting anything.  My Halloween style is much like an amplification of my every day style, which runs on the dark side anyway.  I wish our house had come with a really cool, goth-looking wrought-iron fence and twisty trees.  The skulls on the mantel wear seasonally-appropriate hats.  One year, one of them wore an aviator's helmet and goggles and the other one wore a black, spiky Wicked Queen tiara.  If we got more company up here on the hill, I'd go crazy with glittery spiderweb festooning the woodwork and windows, and black candles, little skulls on everything (okay, the little skulls on everything is a year-rounder around here, much to Shane's chagrin).  I sometimes put out my little candle-holding skeletons on the deck.  They're scary-cute.  Sort of Tim Burton.  You'll never see one of those nasty, big, hairy rats with the red eyes- and if you do, we're actually trying to kill it, so if you can help us with that, there'll be a bounty in it for you.

My Halloween style isn't exactly Disney-esque, but let's just say, I felt right at home in the Haunted Mansion ride at the 'World.  Halloween with a sense of humor instead of a sense of horror.  A holiday with a wink and a crooked grin and a whisper of "Something fabulously Wicked this way comes!"

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