Good Mourning!

Day 18: What's the appropriate salutation for Hallowe'en? Why, "Good mourning," of course! You might find this odd, but as much as I enjoy costuming, Hallowe'en is one of my least favourite holidays. I don't understand it. Perhaps I was oblivious to the way adults celebrated it when I was a kid, but I don't recall as much emphasis on ghoulishness, gore and horror as there is in current times. The costumes of my youth were deliciously scary, not gruesome: cute witches, ghosts haunting in sheets, the occasional vampire. Most were cleverly cobbled together from items around the home rather than store-bought, mass-produced garb you see today. I remember attending one junior-high dance as Huckleberry Finn in tattered jeans and painted freckles, straw hat on my head, fishing pole over my shoulder, and a dead fish (real, bound in plastic wrap) in my hip pocket. I accidentally sat on the fish and although I hadn't expected any of the boys to ask me to dance, social pariah that I was, my math teacher spun me through a ballroom waltz despite the fishy scent which must have surrounded me.

These days, I don't open my door to strangers. In rural Pierce County, you don't open your door for someone you don't know even in broad daylight, let alone at night. When I used to go to my fishing buddy's home for Hallowe'en, I was surprised to find that most of the trick-or-treaters were between 12 and 16, and only a few had bothered to dress up. Eleven was considered too old for trick-or-treating fifty years ago.

When the Nisqually Land Trust hosted their annual Hallowe'en tree-planting, the flyer said, "Costumes optional." In the past, this event has been billed as the "zombie planting," presumably because as a zombie, you can get absolutely filthy and it just improves the effect. That said, I now have a greater sympathy for zombies, especially those in the Pacific Northwest where the blackberry vines are in league to pull them back into their graves as they search for brains.