life is a treat.

Ask 9 year old, 4th grade Gina her favorite holiday and you would get this answer:

Halloween.

Yep. I loved October 31st…better than Christmas.

Halloween meant costumes… and costumes meant witches… and witches had long nails… and I was a witch so I could press those suckers on and  pretend!

Halloween was a haunted house youth fundraiser held at our church. Yes. Our church. And my dad, the preacher, was in charge. He was a scream king and coached me on how to perfect the pop up out of the casket… on cue.

Halloween was a carnival at the high school with a fortune teller, bean bag toss, cake walk, prizes and most importantly…a “wedding chapel”. Yes. Underneath that tent members of Student Council would marry us to our boyfriends and give us gold plastic fantastic rings to make it official.

Halloween was popcorn balls and caramel apples and a candy haul that kept our small town dentist in a really nice house.

Favorite memory of all has to be when I went out well before trick or treating time (I’ve always had issues with patience) and rang the doorbell of an elderly couple down the street. He said his wife had run to the store to pick up some candy and wasn’t back yet…however I didn’t leave empty handed.

“How about a watermelon?”

Sure!

It was too heavy to carry but I had a plan. I ran home and got my doll carriage….wheeled it down the street and plopped that watermelon in there like a fat baby and headed back to the house.

Next thing I knew, it fell through the bottom and splattered all over the sidewalk. Oh well…we tried. I don’t remember being sad, I was on a candy getting mission and a busted buggy wasn’t going to stop me.

I remember getting candy cigarettes and feeling so dirty and wrong that I loved them the best. What adult hands out candy cigarettes to small children? That’s funny. But I puffed those things with my Lee Press On Nails and felt like the kind of chick that Fonzi would dig…no doubt.

Once I had kids, Halloween had been “found out”.  The origination of the celebration was uncovered and we discovered there was more to this than a costume, some candy and a carnival. Churches offered alternatives…and still do. Trunk or Treat…Harvest Festivals…a place for us to still do everything everyone else is doing but without the guilt. We were Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz instead of witches. We were angels instead of devils. We were Samson instead of Frankenstein. Candy purchased from the same stores, just handed out in a different fashion.

So today is over and if you didn’t participate the good news is all the candy will be marked half off tomorrow and even more so by the end of the week…time to clear the shelves and get ready for Christmas! Oh boy…here we go again.  Now to decide whether or not we want to participate in Santa and a tree or if we want to “keep it holy”.

Let me let you in on a little something. The way we treat the cashier in training at Target who is taking a little longer than we would appreciate is much more effective in our “christian walk” and speaks louder than our opposition or acceptance of a few man made holidays. Just be nice. Be kind. Love others and pray for our country.

I release you to raise your kids the way you want to raise them. If you turned your garage into a haunted house I hope you gave it your best. If you closed your blinds, turned off your porch light and ignored the ones brave enough to ring your doorbell anyways, I hope you watch the sun rise tomorrow and breathe a sigh of relief that another Halloween has come and gone.

You do you.

You wanna know what’s scarier than Halloween?

This election.

Boo.