Halloween

Halloween is one of my favorite holidays. I think I get more excited about helping the kids figure out their costumes than they do, sometimes. It’s not unusual for us to spend a month or more working out plans for dressing up. Someday I’m going to get my husband converted, and the entire family is going to spend the holiday in costume.

Someday, but he’s not quite there yet.

Halloween was always full of fun for my family as I was growing up. My mom would tell us stories of tricks and pranks she and her sister played as kids. She delighted in ghost stories and getting herself, and us, all spooked.

We had a big box in our attic marked “Halloween.” It was full of costume pieces and we always looked forward to the time of year for pulling the costume box out of the attic. My cousins and I would spend hours becoming all manner of hobo or goblin. My mother was often finding new items to throw in the box, surprising us with more costume options. We had wigs of every color, gowns, hats, and all sorts of mismatched clothes.

One year I hosted a slumber party near Halloween. A few miles from our house there was an old graveyard. It was very small, surrounded by plowed fields and pasture land, depending on the season. Mom rigged a “ghost” in the graveyard and took the kids out near dusk. Though I knew of her plans, I didn’t quite catch all the details. When she said the keyword, my signal to point at something in the corner of the graveyard so that all the girls would see the ghost fly through the air, I pointed them to the wrong corner. My mom sent the ghost flying and there wasn’t so much as a squeal. Nobody saw it. By the time she had us turned around to try to scare us again, the whole situation was so funny that we were all laughing like crazy. The ghost wouldn’t fly a second time. It only bobbed in a helpless manner, my mom obviously the one trying to make it move.

As I got older and stopped trick-or-treating, Mom started making sure the kids came to our house. She would set up spook houses on our porch. The kids had to come in to get the candy and she always looked forward to visitors on Halloween evening. The older I got, the more elaborate her haunted houses grew. Neighbors and family would send me pictures when I was grown and had moved away, of my mother in costume with her trick-or-treaters.

The day of Halloween now marks a special day of remembrance for my family. It was on Halloween morning that my mother awoke and watched the morning sun rise for the last time. It marked the end of a very long, difficult time for our family… but I somehow have always felt it appropriate that this day, which people in our family had long thought of as her special holiday, was her last day with us.

I still love Halloween. I miss my mom, and this time of year I think about her often, but I do my best to fill the day with as much fun as she always did.


Evelyn Reaujean Skaggs Million
July 24, 1936 - October 31, 1997