All Hallows' Inflatables

All Saints' Day turned out warmer than Halloween, even in the evening, with a touch of wind and a clear sky. Jupiter is riding high these evenings.

For years I never could remember which was All Saints' and which All Souls', even though I know All Hallows' Eve is the giveaway. Not that anyone asked or tested me on that; I just like to know my calendar. Anyway, all the saints come first. Of course they do. Hierarchy is hierarchy.

Never as common as Christmas decorations, Halloween decorations disappear a lot more quickly too. I took note of the remaining Halloween decorations when driving a few hours ago. Only handful of lights remain, plus a few glowing inflatables. Good riddance for most of those inflatables, I say. Really, what's the excuse for this?

Then again, Scooby and his pals do seem to run into fake ghouls with alarming regularity. Every day is Halloween for that crew.

Candy Collection Completed

After a Novemberish day of rain and wind on Sunday, Halloween was clear, nearly windless, and cool, about 50° F. Not a bad day to roam a suburban neighborhood. Beats the snowy havoc on the East Coast.

Like last year and the year before, this Halloween I took Ann to visit her friend Elizabeth, who counts as an old friend, I guess, since they go back to preschool, though they attend different elementary schools. The two of them set out in her neighborhood, with Elizabeth's dad and I not far away. Then we did the same in my neighborhood. Ann wore black and was a "vampire queen," though she decided false vampire teeth were too much trouble. Elizabeth wore black and was a bat.

Ann collected a few pounds of candy, which now sits in a pillow case (Lilly has one too). Mostly they're products of the candy cartels. In no special order, the contents of the bag include Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, M&Ms, Skittles, Tootsie Rolls, Snickers, Twizzlers, Laffy Taffy, Reese's Peanut Butter Pumpkins, Nestle Crunch, Dots, Tootsie Pops, Nerds, Whoppers, Wonka Bottle Caps, Dum Dums, Air Heads, M&M Minis, Twix, Milky Way, 3 Musketeers, Reese's Pieces, Smarties, KitKat, Jolly Rancher, jawbreakers, peppermints, SweetTarts, Hershey bars, 100 Grand, PayDay, Snickers Almond, Butterfinger, Starburst, Skittles, Baby Ruth, Junior Mints, Peanut Butter M&Ms, and Starbursts.

Plus a few oddities, such as Market Pantry brand Halloween fruit snacks (no, that isn't more healthful than candy), Hi-Chew Green Apple fruit chews (ditto), a small bag of pretzels, Soft 'n Chewy Now and Later, and a thing called Snickers Peanut Butter Squared, which I understand is new this year.

As a longstanding fan of the Snickers bar, I wonder about this hybrid. If it says Snickers, it shouldn't have peanut butter, which is the bailiwick of other brands. If it says peanut butter, it shouldn't say Snickers. Somewhere in the realm of Forms is the Snickers Bar, which material Snickers bars mimic. It doesn't include peanut butter.

Item From the Past: Lilly's First Jack o' Lantern

We got around to creating a jack o' lantern this evening. Ann drew a design on the pumpkin, then I carved the top off. I insisted that she remove most of the pumpkin seeds and slimy orange entrails. I'm tired of that task, and I also wanted a visceral Halloween memory for her. Then I cut some more holes.

I would put it outside tonight with a candle, but it's an intensely windy and wet night out there, so it can go out on Halloween itself.

Lilly said that she wanted to help with this year's carving, but when the time came, she didn't bother. When Lilly was just a few weeks short of her first birthday in 1998, I took a picture of her examining a curious orange orb.

Later, I put the jack o' lantern on our front porch.

Later still, squirrels -- or very small minions of Beelzebub -- feasted on it, making it more frightful.

The Day of the Flapper

The chain inside the upstairs toilet broke this morning, so after everyone else had left for school or work, I made my way to the hardware store formerly known as Ace (now it just says the generic "Hardware"). Toilet chains are sold only in combination with toilet flappers, and I got one.

It made my day just to learn that name. I've seen the part in operation over the years, of course, but never thought about its name. I also today learned even toilet flappers have a web page, as everything seems to: "All the flap on THE FLAPPER." Read and learn.

It didn't take long to replace to flapper-chain combo. The old flapper, with its bulbous front end and two prongs sticking backward, could be a small model for a Romulan or Klingon ship or the like. That is, a sinister-looking Enterprise sort of model.

For all my grousing about Halloween, I am looking forward to some parts of it, such as accompanying Ann and her friend on their rounds. It won't be many more years before I won't do that any more, as Ann wanders in a pack with her friends, just as Lilly does (even though I chide her that she's too old for trick or treating -- but we both know that attitudes have changed since I was in junior high).

Lilly never wore the costume to the right for Halloween activities, but she did pose for a picture. I think I took it 10 years ago. The costume came as a special section to some Japanese magazine. We unfolded the section and did some re-folding and presto, some child-sized space armor and a helmet emerged, ready to wear.

Grumbling About Halloween

Against my better judgment, I went with my family to a big box retailer on Sunday that has a lot of Halloween merchandise right now. The store was crowded. The store was noisy. The store was stocked with overpriced faux-macabre trappings for a holiday that doesn't need many trappings. Some of the made-for-dollar-in-China adult costumes were $40 or $50, but even the flimsiest, cheapest item wasn't cheap.

I managed to get out without spending anything, but only because we could go to another big box nearby, one with a different array of normal merchandise that hadn't gone over so heavily toward Halloween. But it was advertising Halloween items at a significant discount, and it turned out to be true. We managed to outfit the girls with some costume items -- things they actually wanted -- for a little less than $15.

Halloween, bah. Or rather, the ridiculous trappings of the day. It's gotten even more annoying since Beldar Conehead complained about it.

Beldar: Oh, Connie, I want no knowledge of this human activity. Halloween, a miserable Earth festival. It is regrettable that the High Master demanded that we return to this planet. On our home planet, Remulak, at this moment, all cones are celebrating the Harvest Under the Moons of Meepzor. Now, that's a party! All the gellato spirots will be harvested and smoked.

Connie: So what? Big deal!

Prymaat: The Harvest of Meepzor, long ago, was when I first saw Beldar's cone. How young and strong he looked as he pursued and captured the greased garfok, which was roasted for all to consume.

Beldar: This miserable Earth festival is nothing but a ritual costume fantasy for the young ones, who move through the night demanding small consumables.

Costumes & Candies

Just like last year, Ann joined her friend Elizabeth for Halloween, and Elizabeth's father and I walked with them around their neighborhood and then ours in the late afternoon. There was less wind this year than last, along with clear skies, though it wasn't that warm.

Ann had found a blue princess dress and peaked cap that her sister had worn, once upon a time; Elizabeth had a pink princess dress that she said was Princess Peach, or Princess Peach Toadstool in full, according to various authoritative Super Mario web sites. The iterations of Mario Bros. have had a very light impact on my life -- they're the guys in Donkey Kong as far as I'm concerned -- so I'll take their word for it.

We did see small versions of Mario and Luigi out looking for candy during our rounds. Other costumes included various zombies (one was a football player), skeletons, witches and characters from pop fiction: Capt. Hook, Minnie Mouse and at one point, Princess Leia and Darth Vader, who seemed to be in separate groups across the street from each other. Vader didn't try to take Leia prisoner, however.

There was no one dressed as Snooki, a Chilean miner, a bedbug or an invasive Asian carp, to be topical. My favorite costume-sighting was a boy wearing two cardboard boxes. A larger one around his torso, a smaller one on his head. The larger one had arm holes, the smaller one eye holes. Images of WALL-E, printed from web sites, were taped to the outside of the box. So he was WALL-E.

Neither Lilly nor Ann collected anything that odd on their rounds. If I were more energetic, or maybe neurotic, I would catalog the candies by manufacturer, just to show how few companies actually control the confection trade. For my own part, I went downmarket this year in giving candy away: Tootsie pops, Lemonheads, Smarties and Mary Janes, the last of which are a Necco product, much like Bit-O-Honey, and with the same potential for filling removal. All these were available in $1 bags at the last dollar store I visited.

Halloween '10

Halloween has arrived at last. Merchants and broadcasters and advertisers are doing their best to stretch the damn thing out deep into October, something like the way Christmas has consumed December, and I say resist. One day is enough for Halloween. If we want more holiday, we North Americans should add Día de los Muertos to the festivities. It would be a fine cultural import. Early November seems like a good time to visit relatives in graveyards and feasting back home to their memory, complete with sugar skulls.

Japan has a multiday holiday to honor the departed: O-bon (お盆). The Kansai area celebrates O-bon in August. There were festivities and visits to grave sites. But mainly it meant that nearly everything shut down and that everybody had a week's vacation at the same time. Long-distance travel at the time was difficult at best, so each year I spend my mandatory week off poking around places I could reach on local trains. One year, I went to see the lighting of the Gozan-no-okuribi Daimonji in the hills outside Kyoto, which was a cool thing to see, but that's as far as I ventured during O-bon.

A Wall Street Journal blog posting (which may or may not be available now) includes this assertion regarding Halloween creep: "Many families started with parties last weekend, and will continue celebrating through Sunday night, extending what used to be a one-day holiday over more than a week. Moreover, some parents are taking time off of work [Friday] for school parties and parades, or on Monday to recover."

Oh, really? The blog is about how stressful it can be to raise a family while working in the money economy, too. (That isn't quite how the writer phrases it.) Oddly, there's no suggestion in this particular posting about how much less stressful it is let Halloween be a one-day holiday; or better, a two- or three-hour holiday. To paraphrase my eldest daughter, "The candy's the thing."

That and fond memories of one's own Halloweens. Some of my earliest memories of Halloween involve hearing stories, already current in the late 1960s, about poisoned candy or razor blades (or pins) in apples that were dispensed to unlucky children. My own favorite was, and is, the tale of kids who received chocolate Ex-Lax while trick-or-treating. As literal fact, the poison-candy stories are almost all nonsense. But since we moderns generally disbelieve stories of evil spirits roaming the land on All Hallow's Eve, we need some other kind of menace out there on October 31.

Take Knife to Pumpkin, Cut Holes

Not long ago, the real estate agent who participated in the sale of our house to us -- back in those dimly remembered pre-real estate crash days early in the 2000s -- gave us a couple of large pumpkins. He and his parter give away pumpkins in October to former clients and would-be clients. They also hire a Santa Claus to visit their office in December, complete with photographer to capture the moment. They are real estate pros, and don't want to be forgotten even among people for whom selling their house is a distant notion.

Sunday was gourd-cutting day. Ann insisted. No one else cared. So I set to work with a couple of knives, more-or-less following the lines she had drawn on one of the pumpkins. Now it has that jack o' lantern face. Its only distinction is a mouthful of toothpicks, because I mis-cut one of the "teeth" and needed something to hold that part back in place. Otherwise it's a completely traditional design.

Of course I wondered, just how traditional? After all, many things casually considered ancient traditions were invented by the Victorians, or maybe ad men in the early 20th century. Wiki quotes David Skal in Death Makes a Holiday: A Cultural History of Halloween (2002), which sounds like a good book, on the subject.

"Although every modern chronicle of the holiday repeats the claim that vegetable lanterns were a time-honored component of Halloween celebrations in the British Isles, none gives any primary documentation," he writes. "In fact, none of the major nineteenth-century chronicles of British holidays and folk customs make any mention whatsoever of carved lanterns in connection with Halloween. Neither do any of the standard works of the early twentieth century."

"Vegetable lanterns" -- carved turnip, anyone? -- have been around a long, long time, but the association with Halloween might well be more recent, then. Or unique to North America in the 19th century, since that's where the pumpkins were from (but not any more).

Anyway, our vegetable lantern will be inside until shortly before October 31, to reduce the risk of squirrel attacks, and then outfitted with a scented candle for Halloween. One year I put a vanilla-scented candle in the pumpkin, and got a lot of favorable remarks about the smell from visitors that night.

Guy Fawkes, Where Are You?

Guy Fawkes Day, that's what this country needs. The Gunpowder Plot might be a little obscure for Americans, but there's no need for the day to be anchored to any particular historic event. We could burn effigies of other hated figures on November 5 just because we need a day to burn effigies. Last year, for instance, it could have been effigy Wall Street bankers.

But it will never happen here, and if news accounts are to be believed, the custom is being elbowed out in Britain by North American-style Halloween. Our British cousins are making a mistake, if you asked me.

Speaking of Halloween, the candy haul was large this year for both daughters, and much of it is still in the bags in which it was collected. I was mildly disappointed as I pawed through the selection because there was little in the way of unusual candy. Not even any Mexican or Polish candy, which would be quite easy to get around here.

Next year I'm going to make a point of giving away something off beat -- dollar-store or Big Lots items, maybe -- since we too were guilty of giving away only the usual this year: 3 Musketeers, Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, Baby Ruths and Nestle Crunch. These are all good candies, but nothing to make a kid say, "What's this weird one?"

Halloween '09

Distinctly cool on the last day of October this year, and windy too. That was an important consideration for Ann, who wore a witch's costume, with hat, for candy collection in the late afternoon. It blew off so many times that I tied it around her chin, and even then it had a habit of taking flight.

She made the rounds with her friend Elizabeth, who was dressed as a black cat -- her familiar, though I didn't mention the term to them. Elizabeth's father and I trailed behind. It was the first time I'd accompanied either of my children on Halloween in some years, since during the last few Lilly has gone with her friends and Ann has tagged along. Lilly, tired of this arrangement, was actually the one who suggested Elizabeth this year, and Ann latched onto the idea. Lilly was thus free to troll for candy with her friends and for all I know spread toilet paper around (but none from our stock, as far as I could tell).

The best costume I saw on the suburban sidewalks this year was a boy -- though I guess it could have been a girl -- dressed as Death. Complete black vestments, including a black hood and a black covering that obscured the face. No scythe or ticket to Samara or any other deathly tokens, however, just plain ol' Death. Maybe the kid was 10 years old, so Death was short. You'd think Death would have a more commanding height, but maybe that's just a prejudice of the living. Or maybe he was supposed to be La Petit Mort. But somehow I doubt it.

Most of the other kids, and the scattering of adults who dressed for the day, sported run-of-the-mill costumes. What would have really been scary this Halloween? Someone dressed as a foreclosure notice. Or maybe a pink slip.

The houses we passed varied, as you'd expect, from undecorated to outrageously decorated for the day. The odd thing was that the amount of decoration offered no clue as to whether anyone would open the door to dispense candy. It used to be that if you were willing to give away candy, you'd leave your porch light on; if the lights were off, you declined to participate. Here's a contemporary tip for homeowners who insist on decorating for Halloween: If you're going to decorate, especially to the ridiculous nines, open your damn door and give something away.

My own favorite bit of decor was a skeleton made out of cut-up plastic milk jugs. That took some cleverness on someone's part. Almost as good was a faux-bone and faux-skull wind chime, though it would have been much better if they had been real bones. But we're in suburban Chicago, not Bohemia.

Pumpkin Eyebrows

Our Halloween decor is pretty spare this year. In fact, a lone pumpkin doesn't really signify All Hallows Eve, just fall or harvest season. Ann drew a face on it and we put it outside near the front door not long ago. But the weather has been wet lately, so most of the ink disappeared. When I brought it in for picture-taking, only the eyebrows were visible.

Or maybe those were the eyes, not to the eyebrows. Not sure what Ann intended. Still, I like to imagine that my pumpkin has distinctive, John L. Lewis eyebrows, if nothing else.

Down the Block, A Minion of Beelzebub

It's just an impression, but it looks like neighborhood Halloween decorations are scarcer this year than even last. Maybe people have less taste for contrived frights among the real economic frights of our time. Inflatables seem very scarce. They're ridiculous, but that didn't stop people before. But it does cost money to operate the things, which might have inspired some second thoughts about them.

The family about four houses down has decorated more than most. Last week a straw-stuffed dummy with a pumpkin head appeared in a lawn chair on their front lawn. Then a mock giant spider and its web were erected on a small window. This afternoon as Ann and I were walking by, the father of the household, a fellow I know slightly, was standing outside smoking a cigarette and looking into his picture window.

"You want to see it move?" he said to us.

Then I noticed a black-draped, mostly faceless figure in the window. Supposed to be witch-like, I figured. It had glowing blue eyes, so it was already plugged in. That or in communication with Beelzebub.

He must have just finished setting it up. He ducked inside the front door and soon the figure started a slow gyration. Not bad. Better than any inflatable. Ann wasn't scared, but she might have felt differently about it at night.

All Hallow's Eve Aught-Eight

Coming on Friday this year, Halloween had some extra punch, at least for the kids out trolling for candy. Visitors started showing up about two hours before sunset, and continued ringing the doorbell until about two hours after sunset. I was giving away individual Reese's peanut butter cups and Kit Kats, which got a few comments of approval. For some reason, Kit Kats rate a remarkably long Wiki entry; not so much for Reese's.

About 30 kids showed up at our house all together, none with outlandish costumes. My own favorite were a couple of very small kids -- 2 and 3, I'd guess, with their dad right next to them, dressed as bees. (The dad wasn't a bee, actually.) They were so small that he had to tell them not to be afraid to approach the door to receive their candy.

I'm happy to report that few high school kids came by. In years past, waves of them would typically turn up later in the evening. I don't have anything against high school kids per se (yet), but by the time you're in high school, you're "too old to trick-or-treat, too young to die." I wonder if Lilly will pay attention to my thinking on this in future years. Probably not.

Lilly and Ann went to a friend of Lilly's early in the game, and did most of their candy-seeking in that neighborhood, about half a mile from here, along with other girls. Since it was Friday, they busied themselves in this way until about 8:30, which suited me. I drove over to pick them up, and they both had pillow cases heavy with sweets. Bulging with candy. Laden down with confection. The mark of a fine time romping around, if you're a kid.

Halloween Wrap

Lilly and Ann went trolling for candy on Halloween with a friend of Lilly's and that friend's neighbors, a couple of older girls, in a neighborhood not too distant from home, but not our block. When they got home loaded with sweets, they were too tired to make the rounds on our block, and I didn't insist out of some sense of spending precious time with my kids. I've done the rounds with them before, and probably will again.

About 15 kids showed up at our door, which is a fairly light turnout, and mostly before dark. The majority were smaller kids, too, which is good. If you're in high school, you're too old to trick or treat. That's the way it was in 1975 and that's the way it should be now.

I dispensed "fun size" Snickers, 3 Musketeers, KitKats and Milky Ways. Maybe I should have bought a gross of Snickers or somesuch at Costco and given those away -- full-sized bars are much more fun than "fun size." Every kid, and I mean every kid, carried a pillow case for their candy. What's up with that? Even Lilly asked to carry one, and we obliged her, and also gave one to Ann. She says her teacher suggested it. Maybe there was a memo from the PTA.

Only one costume stood out among the usual suspects. One of the last kids to come by, a boy of about 12, wore a fairly realistic nun's habit. Make what you will of that.

Lilly and Ann's hauls included -- not an exhaustive list, and in no special order -- Skittles, Act II Butter Mini Bag microwavable popcorn, KitKats, Reese's (original and pieces), Snickers, Summer Harvest bite size mini pretzels (with a witch on the bag), Ritz Bits peanut butter crackers, Sour Punch Twists, Nacho Cheese Doritos, Yogos Rollers (what?), Milk Duds, Milky Way, Mike and Ike Original Fruits, Twix, Swedish Fish, Now and Later banana candy (product of Mexico), PayDay, Gummy Skulls, Hershey's, 3 Musketeers, Smarties, M&Ms, Heath bars, Jolly Rancher, Butterfinger, Junior Mints, Mr. Goodbar, Baby Ruth, Kasugai litchi candy and Bourbon Raisin Sand (Japanese candies), Starburst, Nerds brand gum balls, Almond Joy, 100 Grand, Tootsie Rolls, Creme Savers Apple Pie a la Mode, Cry Baby Bubble Gum, Sweet Tarts, Goetze's, Blow Pops, Oreos, Dots, peppermints, Wonka Bottle Caps, and various lolly pops and gum varieties. Some of the first-string chocolates -- Snickers, 3 Musketeers, et al. were regular size. One of the full-sized Snickers had "Green Shrek® Filling! Same Snickers® Taste!"

Preschool Halloween Parade

Had a camera handy at the Halloween event at Ann's preschool, which was actually on the 30th, since there are no classes on Wednesdays. I'm posting this pic to show the range of costumes, rather than the kids' faces. This may be an obscure blog, but it still counts as publishing, and I don't want to publish images of people, children especially, without permission. Once, when I had to publish a picture of a Santa Claus with a kid on his lap, rather than go through the trouble of getting a parent to sign a release, I took a pic of Lilly (then 13 months old) with Santa, and used that.

The kids had a "parade" through "Safety Town," which is one of those places where junior bicyclists are supposed to learn the Rules of the Road. It was a clear, sunny day, about 60 F., so not bad for walking around in your costume. Many of the girls were princesses of one kind or another, while many of the boys were superheroes -- in this pic, Spiderman and Superman as easy to pick out. The girl with the pointy hat is Ann. She's a witch. It seems that I'm encouraging Wicca in my preschooler. Behind her was a pint-sized Darth Vader, though at that moment he'd taken his mask of. He hadn't, that I could hear, learned to make those menacing breath noises yet.

Borat & KISS Come to Town

I went to New York to find out about Borat. Not really, but find out I did, unless you count the vague notion I had of him previously, based on reading something or other at sometime or other. My nephew and I happened to see David Letterman’s broadcast on October 30, and Sacha Baron Cohen in character happened to be a guest, talking up his movie.

He was funny. The movie clip was funny. I understand that those who would impose a never-offend/kindergarten-class standard on humor, and even Kazakhstani officials, have taken umbrage at his antics. Lighten up, I say, especially to the Kazakhstanis. We here in the USA are often misrepresented in the movies, very often in the ones we make ourselves, and we live with it.

Borat succeeded in making me aware of Borat and the movie, which was the purpose of him being on TV. But I’m not an impulsive teenager, so I didn’t rush out to see the movie on opening weekend, and odds are that I’ll consider seeing it in the theater but not actually do so – or not at full price if I do. Instead, I'll rent the DVD someday, where I get around to it. This is why many movies aren’t made for grownups.

Borat also had a “float” in the Greenwich Village Halloween parade. I know because I went with my nephew Dees and fellow Alexander band member Cyrus to see the parade from a spot on Sixth Ave. near 14th St. Good spectacle, once it got under way: mostly marchers in a wide array of costumes, but also bands and decorated vehicles, and best of all, enormous puppets on tall rods, carried along the parade route by a number of puppeteers each. My favorites were the dancing-skeleton puppets and the big pumpkins, lit somehow from the inside. A more comprehensive description of the parade is here, more than a single onlooker could possibly see – its photo selection is a “best of” selection of the many thousands of costumes on view over the years, I think.

A handful of Borats were riding in a Borat-themed truck; for all I know, Sacha Baron Cohen was among them. Elsewhere – and a lot of people in the audience were in costume – we saw a couple of other Borats. The truck, at least, counted as an advertisement, and there were other ad-vehicles in the parade as well. Most conspicuous was the KISS float. As it passed, I wondered whether actual KISS band members were involved, or if it were merely some kind of tribute. How would you know just looking at them? I looked it up later, and sure enough, Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley were riding on the vehicle, in town promoting a new box set. According to the AP, they were “grand marshals” of the parade. That might be fitting, but it didn’t seem like the kind of parade that needed that concept.

KISS is still around? I was never a fan, but of course I knew about them in their ’70s heyday. I would have thought by now that the forces of the KISS Army would have been defeated by the forces of Time, which defeats everyone eventually. But not yet, I guess. At least they have the advantage of not visibly aging in place, unlike, say, the Rolling Stones.

There wasn’t as much political content in the parade as I thought there would be, coming as it did a week before the election. But there was a large George W. Bush head on a pole, with a spool of paper coming out of his mouth that said, LIES HATE FEAR. Later, a fellow dressed like a peach but wearing a Bush mask came by, holding a sign that said, “I’m Peach Bush.” Must have seemed clever when he thought of it. More bizarrely still, a man carried a sign (his costume was forgettable, and I have forgotten it) that berated Madonna as a “cultural imperialist” for her recent foray in transnational adoption. The mind boggles. He might also be worried that the KISS Army is about to invade Africa, too.

Halloween Lights

A house nearly across the street from us has been decked out for Halloween by its owners. Not inflatable creatures or a quasi-gothic graveyard theme, but Halloween lights, which are still fairly rare in our area, despite what must be a determined effort by merchandisers to make them as common as Christmas lights.

One other neighbor has a short string of glowing electric jack o' lanterns in his yard, but that barely counts compared to the Halloween lights display across the street: orange lights along the roofline, others in the bushes, and hanging icicle-like lights that are orange instead of white or silver. Everything is orange, in fact, except a string around the door, which is green.

Something about Halloween lights doesn't quite sit right. Christmas lights are lighting up the darkness of early winter, and the electric versions are descendants of candles and oil lamps, though I suppose those couldn't have been put along rooflines without disaster. Halloween lights, on the other hand, are what? Orange lights could, maybe, have something to do with the harvest of pumpkins. But if you wanted that, you could display actual pumpkins. No, Halloween ought to embrace the darkness, rather than light a candle against it.

Besides, it's enough that I decorate for Christmas. Halloween too? Beyond pumpkins, that is, four of which we bought recently, one large enough to carve into a jack o' lantern, the others small enough for decoration. Ann took the smallest one and drew a face on it. Then she insisted on sleeping next to it.

Halloween Wrap

Halloween was dank this year. Chill and drizzle feel right on Allhallow’s Eve, but it does cut down on the trick-or-treaters. About a dozen of various ages came by our house, not nearly as many as last year or the year before. We gave away cheapo lollipops, Blow Pops by brand name, two bags of which we’d bought at Meijer as almost an afterthought a few days ago. Blow Pops. Sounds like slang for something illicit. “After the cops knocked down the door, crime-scene techs uncovered evidence of a crude blow pop lab.”

The day before I’d gutted the pumpkin and cut a face into it. I’m not very imaginative when it comes to jack-o-lantern design, so it had triangle eyes and nose, and a ragged-tooth mouth. My most imaginative jack-o-lantern concept was in October 2001, when I came up with Osama bin Pumpkin as an entry in my office building’s pumpkin-carving contest, but no one in my office, me included, actually created such a thing.

But I did add a distinctive element to jack this year, unintentionally. I needed a candle to light his inside, so I took a scented one from the lower bathroom, vanilla I think. Four or five people commented on the “marshmallow” smell. It did smell pretty good. Maybe that’s what you get when you mix vanilla and pumpkin. I’ve discovered a new use for scented candles.

Ann had thrown up a couple of times during the day but otherwise didn’t seem ill (and she’s OK now). Still, we decided she wasn’t fit for trolling the block for candy. Just as important, she was too young to protest the decision or feel any disappointment.

So Lilly and I walked around in the light drizzle. For her it was merely the last phase of the holiday. Immediately after school, she’d gone trick-or-treating with her friend Rachel, another second-grader who lives about a half-mile away. Last Friday, Lilly’s school held a Halloween “dance” and I took her and her sister. Lilly wore her blue fairy outfit, Ann a “Cinderella” dress. That’s what we called it, anyway.

On Saturday, the girls didn’t dress up, but we accidentally participated in the Lincoln Park Zoo’s Halloween festivities (see Sunday). We didn’t know it beforehand, but it turned out that the zoo was giving away candy and other items to kids that afternoon -- to long lines of kids, many in costume, waiting for candy, so I guess they’d heard about it.

In fact, there were so many kids there to collect candy that the zoo was a zoo. In some places, the animal exhibits were closed, maybe because the zookeepers didn’t want the animals scared by the commotion. We waited in a few of these lines, equipped with paper bags supplied by zoo staff, and at the end of the lines other staffers gave away candy: second-rate varieties like Swedish Fish that had obviously been donated.

More zoo personnel -- or maybe Halloween temps -- wandered around in full-body costumes, including such characters as Minnie Mouse and Big Bird, which seemed to astonish Ann. Look what just stepped out of the TV!

Each of them walked around with another person as a kind of guide, since peripheral vision might have been limited by the getups. One came along dressed as the PBS cartoon character Arthur, with a female companion dressed something like a nurse. “Arthur and his physical therapist,” I said to Lilly as they passed by. The “physical therapist” heard it and laughed.