Halloween

One of my favorite things about Halloween is the persistence of old-fashioned homemade creativity in celebrating it. The old-man shirt and faded overalls stuffed with leaves from the yard, sitting on the front step with a hand-carved pumpkin head balanced on top. Tissue paper ghosts hanging off the front porch rail. Or the elaborate yard display my neighbors a couple doors down set up, complete with a mini cemetery of cardboard gravestones that cropped up in their front yard. Maybe it's because Halloween is all about mess and gore, decay, and scaring people, instead of the impossible to achieve perfection of a sparkling Thanksgiving dinner or beautifully presented Christmas gift. Or maybe because we are given license to dress up as anything we want, to disguise ourselves, to become something or someone else for a day, that we feel free to be creative.

My own childhood costumes revolved around dreams of being something I was not. Most popular with my sisters and I was to be a gypsy, probably because it guaranteed mom would let us use her tube of red lipstick and root through her jewelry box for the most sparkly things we could find. The gypsy theme persisted into junior high when I told fortunes for the participants at the church Halloween party one year. (This was before we moved to small-town Kansas, where Halloween was considered pagan and definitely un-Christian, and the Baptist preacher's wife across town organized an anti-Halloween party where you had to dress up as your favorite Bible character.)

I dimmed the light in the ladies powder room, set up a small table covered in a fringed scarf and acted like I could see into the future of the women who came through the door. Their willingness to believe I held some kind of intuitive power was more convincing than my performance, but they definitely bought into the act. This was probably one of the first moments in my life where I began to realize that adults were vulnerable and not the all-knowing beings I thought they were. Mrs. Parker was hanging on my every word--she really thought I could see into her future, and she really wanted to know what was in store for her.

This year, my new workplace--an affordable housing management non-profit--allowed us to dress up for Halloween. Of course, this came with a long list of warnings and disclaimers from HR to make sure we wouldn't offend anyone or be too sexy or too horrifying. I had to come up with something besides the zombie bellydancer I was last year (too sexy). So I went for horrifying and creeped out the property managers by dressing up as a bed bug. Big paper bag cut out like a sandwich board with some hairy, segmented legs drawn on the front, my boyfriend's welding glasses with some pipe cleaner antennae attached, and a nametag, just in case there was any question about my identity. I won for most creative.

Maybe with the economy in such a shambles and everyone needing to save money, we'll all replace blind consumerism with a rediscovered creativity. Let's celebrate by enjoying lumpy mashed potatoes and homemade pies with dripping fruit filling for Thanksgiving. We'll make some nametags for the table out of folded-over index cards, and start thinking about what lovely imperfect gifts we can create for our loved ones this Christmas. I plan to use the hand-knitted pot holder my friend Denise gave me to pull some Italian cookies out of the oven, from the recipe another friend shared with me as a house-warming gift. Let's all spread the creative love!