Halloween is my favorite holiday. My house is decorated with realistic, life sized serial killers and an array of smoking caldrons and candy bowls with grisly moving parts. A walk through the house sets off a cacophony of warnings, witches’ cackles and evil laughs and can be genuinely terrifying when alone or in the dark.
For fun I sometimes leave things ON during the night and guests are forced to crawl like soldiers avoiding sniper fire, under the radar of motion sensors, when they need a bottle of water in the middle of the night.
When people ask my children how they lived in a haunted house for the month of October, they respond with shrugs and blank stares. It is all they have ever known.
Every year Dee, Kim, Jill and I would dress in elaborate costumes, gather our children and their friends and head out in a caravan of golf carts to go trick-or-treating. The children would scamper over the lawns to get their candy and we would drink too much Vampire Chardonnay and nick their Butter Finger candy bars and black licorice.
Every year we lost one of the smallest or most vulnerable children (there’s a lot of ponds in Jacksonville – and alligators…) We hit the back of each other’s carts like bumper cars. Our antics infuriated my dour husband, scowling on the front porch as he begrudgingly handed out candy. Halloween was always his least favorite holiday.
Last year I was sober for Halloween. As you can see, it didn’t impact my commitment…
