Day 2 : Happy Halloween

I really like Halloween. I remember as a kid being just giddy every year that two such brilliant things could happen within days of each other - Halloween, and then, 5 days later - Bonfire Night.

There’s a particular shift in the world that always comes around bonfire night. The sky is that very particular leaden orange that just means it can only be this time of year. You can smell it, even hear it; cars driving through the orange dark, the lights from inside houses, I don’t know. And then on the 5th November you add the smoke from fires that crackle away in back gardens and Rugby Clubs across the country, and the sudden scream and bang of fireworks, and people staring into the flames from garden chairs, unspeaking, long after the last Roman Candle has pfut-pfut-pfutted its blinding sparks across the grass and everyone’s pretended to be impressed.

But it’s not bonfire night is it, it’s Halloween. I do love a bit of a Pagan celebration. Even these days, when the black leotards are no longer dragged out from the back of the drawer to transform us into cats and bats and witches. The sweet syrup blood from a squeezy bottle, the gum-chafing plastic teeth, worn for two photos and then discarded. The torn-open bin bag of a witches’ cape, and the pumpkins. I love the pumpkins.

Last night Polly-in-Berlin sent photos of some ace pumpkins she’d carved with her nephew. When I replied I found myself saying how much I wanted to carve a pumpkin, and how much I loved them, but that I felt it would somehow make me sad. Like carefully preparing your own birthday party, knowing no-one else was going to come. I had already considered buying a pumpkin earlier in the week, and for about 0.5 seconds I’d tried to persuade myself that I should do it, nevermind that there wouldn’t be anyone to say - Wow, don’t they look amazing now they’re lit up? 

Going out and buying a pumpkin seemed like asking for trouble. Something rose up in me at the imagining of it and I took it for the warning it was. I imagined thinking-out a pumpkin face and setting to work, considering the progress with an unnecessarily critical eye, carrying on, tweaking, doubting, rallying. Then lighting a candle in its hollowed out head and being so happy with the results, no matter how crap they were. I knew though, that during this whole activity I would feel more alone than before I started. So. That’s how I knew it was a Bad Plan.

A couple of hours went by and I had suddenly arrived at that precarious point in a day when everything could rapidly go on the skids, unless you get a hold of yourself and have a word. It was at this point that Poll texted, and suggested that we both go out and buy a pumpkin and carve it together. 

Hey presto. At a stroke, this kindness transformed my day from a potential head-hang into something that was bursting at the seams with Halloween joy. Within minutes I’d stuffed on my shoes and grabbed my wallet and was tearing down the stairs to find my pumpkin, and soon after that I was puffing my way back up them again with a future lantern in my bag. I got out knives and spoons and cutting boards and bin bags and I sat on the floor with my laptop and then all of a sudden I was celebrating Halloween - gleeful and giddy like a child, and grateful like a grown-up.

We carved eyes and teeth and scars and noses and weird shapes and then we lit them, and she said something not unlike, Wow, don’t they look amazing now they’re lit up? And then we waved and said bye and I put mine out on the balcony and sent her and everyone else I could think of a picture of Mr. Pumpkin saying HAPPY HALLOWEEN! And then people replied, in kind, and shared their own Halloween Tales from wherever it was they were telling them. 

So in the end I suppose what I’m saying is that even if you throw a party on your own it doesn’t mean you are, not really.

Or, put another way, Happy Halloween.