Boo Y'all

My mom and me, bewitching as usual, Halloween 1981.

I love this time of year. Halloween through Christmas is just a fabulous stretch of celebration which starts with candy and costumes (playing dress up and getting rewarded with junk food? I could have invented Halloween it's so me), moves on turkey and dressing and binge eating and shopping (again, I could have invented this one...so me), and then we arrive at my Most Very Favorite of All Holidays, Christmas. (Sparkly decorations and parties and gifts and eggnog...I could have invented that holiday it's so me).

But back to Halloween. My mom is the one who really honed my fondness for this particular fete; her birthday is October 20 and she loves a good celebration as much as her daughter. Our house was always decorated to the Halloween hilt, we had pumpkins the size of snow tires, and we trick-or-treated with pillow cases our candy haul was so big. As a kid, I had a Halloween party every year complete with a frozen hand floating in the punch bowl, a hayride through a graveyard, and a showing of some horror movie that had at least one attendee sleeping with their parents afterward. And lest I forget the best part of Halloween for me...the costumes. Oh, the costumes!

As you can probably garner, I love dressing up for Halloween. In actuality, I love dressing up for any occasion, but on the 31st of October I can really gussy it up. Over the years, I've been Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, Elvira, a mermaid, Wonder Woman--even Monica Lewinsky (a tacky, yet timely choice back in 1998). And because Clint really is a good sport, he has even gotten in on the costume fun over the years:

Tell me those costumes don't deserve a big handful of treats? If you find yourself looking for a good getup here at the last minute, let me suggest some out-of-the-box ideas for something scary. Why don't you go as a bathroom scale on a Monday morning--yikes! Is there anything more terrifying than an Ogilvie home perm *shivers up my spine*? Or maybe you want to really scare it up and go as the scoreboard at a Clemson football game (that one gets thousands of hearts racing and blood curdling). It's all in good fun, and don't you want to get in on some good fun?

When it comes to Halloween, my answer is pretty much always yes. Yes to the Monster Mash and the Thriller dance, yes to candy corn being considered a vegetable, yes to pumpkin flavored everything. From candy apples to haunted houses, I want in on all of it.

Now that I've confessed to being batty over all things All Hallows Eve, some of you may remember that last year I debated about whether to answer the door for the approximately one zillion trick-or-treaters that typically bombard our house. In the end, I did wind up treating every single one of those little sugar snatchers and a good time was had by all (well, except those of us trying to eat dinner and one very overstimulated little guard dog). This year, in a move that I think is pure genius, I'm leaving a bowl of candy on the front steps and heading to a friend's house for cocktails and marshmallow roasting. Now everyone's happy.

So put on your witch's hat, watch scary movies until you need your nightlight, and eat your weight in candy. It's a national holiday, so you're pretty much obligated. And one more thing:

Boo, y'all.