Happy Halloween!

As seems to have become the usual pattern in recent years, the week brought gusty winds and just enough rain to strip and let fly any remaining leaves off the trees, rendered bare and spindly and macabre just in time for Halloween. The bitter cold that blasted through this week lingers in the frost of the morning, and yet later today, this last day before November arrives to sink its gritty teeth into what's left of the Indian Summer harvest, the sun will sufficiently rise to warm the skies, keep the frost at bay, and cast a much welcome glow about things tonight, leaving the trick or treaters to canvas the neighborhoods without having to bury their costumes under layers of ridiculous jackets and scarves.

There's much about the over-commercialization of Halloween and other holidays that I loathe, and frankly, after doing it up for fourteen years, I must admit that I've been struggling in recent years to find the energy to bring up the Halloween (or Easter, or...) box, get the decorations out, carve the pumpkins (color the eggs, trim the tree...), and piece together the costumes (hide the eggs, fill the stockings...). I suppose that amidst the blitz of candy greed and cheap plastic costumes that have sucked all opportunities for creative joy out of the process, Halloween has quite very nearly and clearly lost its meaning, though what meaning it ever held for me I would be hard pressed to remember: getting as much candy as possible? winning the costume contest? egging the house of that boy you have a crush on?

And yet, there's still something about Halloween that I love--losing myself in the creation of a costume, filling the house with the smell of roasting pumpkin seeds, heading out on a balmy October night, stars overhead, the excitment and promise of the haunt of the evening before us. The glory years of Halloween are behind us, those years when the kids were little and we had oodles of time to spend thinking up and working on costumes; now, it seems, the busy-ness of our colliding schedules leaves little room for such frivolity, and yet, I miss it. It's another indication that we outgrow the phases of our lives, spiral back into the swirling energy of memories, and try to recapture some of the magic that used to be.
I have happy memories of Halloweens past, when I'd spend hours working with the boys on their costumes--clowns, Oompa Loompas, Harry Potter, and then the usual crop of scary monsters and super freaks, but it's been a long time since I've whipped up a costume for myself. But this year was to be different. I woke up this morning and felt this crazy desire to put one together. And not just any costume. No, it had to be Sally. I started identifying with Sally, the Tim Burton character from his wonderful flick A Nightmare Before Christmas, after my first surgery, when I gingerly removed the bandages after my surgical biopsy/lumpectomy to find that my left girl had been pummeled, the stuffing plucked out, the skin stitched up. It was to be only the first of several such life-saving, loving mutilations and reconstructions. My reconstructed girl is covered with stitches and scars and a sculptural nipple to boot, and in Sally, with her Dr. Finkelstein-created, stitch and scar-covered body, her restlessness, and longing to leave the confines of her tower room in the search for something better in her life, I found a kindred spirit. To be certain, underneath her patchwork dress is a girl or two like mine. But Sally, of course, is an expert at needlework, unlike me (this is something I happily rely on Dr. Pitts for.) When she decides to flee her overprotective creator, she must fling herself out of the high tower window, fall to the ground below, and retrieve her limbs that have, of course, torn off and tumbled away. She carries her needle and thread with her at all times, and restitches herself together with admirable speed and skill. Ah, if escape were only that easy.
With Dominick's help, I've made myself a Sally costume. We literally whipped it up in about a half an hour, slicing apart an old dress that had been banished to the local Survival Center pile, taking scissors and hot glue gun (I don't generally sew) to fabric scraps, using fabric markers to "stitch" it all together, and fashioning a Sally-esque, Dr. Finkelstein creation that would certainly not earn me a spot on Project Runway. Soon, Sally will fling herself out of this tower window, stitch and stuff herself back together, and join her Zombie-child in Halloween town.

After the sugar harvest is in, we'll head to our fire pit to celebrate Samhain (sow-in), the ancient Celtic festival that marked the end of summer and the harvest and celebrated their new year on November 1st. Amidst the dread of the coming darkness and cold of winter, which was a time often associated--for good reason--with human death, Samhain invited the ghosts of the dead to return to earth through the blurred boundary that was thought to exist between the worlds of the living and the dead on this night. The ghosts wreaked havoc, as you can imagine, but it was a welcome sort of mischief for the Celts all those 2000 years ago, since the Druids, or Celtic priests, were able to more easily prophesize about the future in the presence of these otherworldly, roguish spirits, an undertaking that often brought about much needed comfort and direction amidst the chaos and volatility of the natural world on which they so depended.

We all strive to button down the chaos of the world in our own little ways, masking the fear with a bold face, perhaps, or shunting the unpredictable into neat little boxes of tidy order. 2,000 years ago or not, there's something about finding reassurance and protection before the onset of the harshness of winter's extremes that makes sense. Back then, there was no trick or treating, no elaborate costume parties, no trick-or-drink revelry at the local colleges; but as part of the Samhain celebration, people did in fact don costumes, though not ones attainable at your local big box/buy crap store, and not ones easily made by the faint of heart. Instead, they dressed in animal skins and heads, gathered around huge bonfires built by the Druids, and made offerings to the Celtic gods by burning crops and animals in the fires. After trying to stave off winter's dread by telling each other's (good, one would imagine) fortunes, they used the sacred fire to re-light their own hearth fires at home, bringing in the protective powers and spirits of the Celtic dieties for additional comfort and reassurance.

Personally, I need all the comfort and reassurance I can get. So tonight, I'll be revisiting the old pagan traditions of Samhain, offering my old post-surgical binder bras to the dieties, and bringing in the protective fire to embolden my spirit and fortify my soul. And somewhere along the way, I'll be following the wanderlust that lurks deep in my heart, sending me spiraling over the edge, willing to sacrifice life and limb, but knowing that I'll be able to put myself back together, however many pieces there may be.

Happy Halloween! XX, L.