Candy, Wine & Time a'Fleeting
by Laura Diamond

We survived another Halloween.

It was a close call. As of two days before, I hadn’t bought our candy. I hadn’t done a thing about costumes. It was the usual: wait until the last second, then improvise like crazy (making myself nuts in the process).

But this system works for me. My children reinforced its wisdom last year. Months in advance of Halloween they told me they were going to be Frankenstein, then the night before they decided they had to be Manny Ramirez. (That was back when Manny was on steroids and could be counted on for a few homeruns. But I digress . . . . )

With last year in mind, I ignored my children in September when they told me they wanted to dress up as race car drivers this Halloween. I’m sure they meant it at the time. But lo and behold, the week before Halloween my third-grader came home from school excited about his plan to dress as a UCLA SuperFan with three buddies.

Lucky for me, his three fellow SuperFans have mothers who excel at Halloween. They had already bought four blue and yellow wigs, four t-shirts, and all the face paint required.

All we had to do was show up and ask for candy.

We did get a jump on decorating our house this year, and it was ready for weeks. We crawled into the corner of our garage and pulled out the box of creepy stuff we put away last year. Under real spiders, dead and alive, we found our hand painted signs saying “DANGER” and “DO NOT ENTER.” We dangled them from wire hangers on our lemon tree. We taped construction paper spiders to our windows. We placed a large pumpkin on the porch, carved with a crooked smile. The crown jewel in our collection was a skeleton hanging from a hook in front of our door, wearing a white boa and a crown, just for kicks.

I felt pretty good about our house until I walked around the neighborhood. Halloween in this manicured suburban neighborhood is a big deal. Every house is decorated. And by “decorated” I do not mean home-made pumpkin signs and old sheets stuffed with newspapers and hanging from ropes. I mean orange-and-purple-blinking-holiday-lights and giant-inflated-purple-spiders-hung-on-rooftops-by-hired-help. Capital D Decorated.

My kids thought it was cool, but to me it was disappointing. House after house had the same perfect and professionally-installed mega decorations. What could have been a festival of surprises and creative ghoulishness was instead uninspiring cookie-cutter show-off-iness. In six weeks these same houses will all sport matching Santas and Reindeer on their roofs.
I suppose the neighborhood made up for it with a different tradition, one I learned of only recently. After pouring candy into trick-or-treat’ers’ bags, some of my neighbors also pour wine into parents’ cups. How could I have missed this? I guess I’ve been home waiting for kids to show up. Now I understand why our house hasn’t had much action. No vino.

I can adapt. This year I locked up the house, got my paper cup, and trailed behind my kids, together with my husband and all the parents in-the-know. I had to seize the chance to trick-or-treat with them while they still accept the parent-train behind them. I know at some point that will end, that they’ll want to head out on their own to seek candy and laughs with just friends.

When will that come? When will they say, “Bye Mom and Dad,” and we’ll answer, “Be home by 8:30.” When will we be willing to give them that freedom without panicking about the thousand things that could happen? They could get separated from their friends. They could get swept away by a stranger. They could – gasp – gain independence.

For now, I keep them close. I hold them tight. I don’t look too far down the road. I don’t want to see what I know is coming. I see my niece who, at thirteen, has broken free of her mother’s grasp. But I hang on, I close my eyes, I block out the future. I would rather it take me by surprise than spend the present worrying about it. Because, at least for now, when I hold my UCLA SuperFan and his Race Car Driver brother, they squeeze me back.