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 A new blog to contain answers to prompts |
| Prompt: Busy on Halloween Can you think of a person or business whose busiest night of the year is Halloween? Who do you think will be the busiest this Halloween in your family or in your area? -------------- Halloween! The night kids count candy and call it, "my loot," and teenagers seek shivers and fear, Halloween is a harvest. This night, in most places, arrives with the rustle of fallen leaves and crisp autumn air, plus anticipation. For such fancy-seekers and dreamers, Halloween means the thinning of the veil. It becomes something way beyond folklore. It is the opening and, at the same time, the closing shift for some businesses. By that I mean those shops selling costumes, candy, and fear. Halloween is their Christmas, New Year's Eve, and the tax season rolled into one, as if a huge applause when the curtain closes. Also, the week ending in the 31st of the month, like this week now, turns into a blur of last-minute panic, plus a desperate parent or two searching frantically for the specific costume their children had been yearning for. For those parents and other frantic customers, the shop or store owners and workers--now fueled with extra caffeine--move or rush with the grace of the battlefield surgeons if only to mend seams on costumes and morale. How do I know this? Way back when, when we lived on LI, NY, we knew a couple like that; They were our store-owner friends. During the last Halloween nights, he and his wife kept running amok inside their store, muttering, "It'll be over soon! It'll be over soon!" It was as if the Halloween night and the few previous ones were their last breaths before their quiet and peace, with their harvest over and their fields of crop becoming empty. This adrenaline is not only for the store owners, though. It is for the parents lugging boxes and bags of candy and teens wearing masks under which they can barely breathe; and for the real enthusiasts, the make-up artists who spend hours painting wounds on smooth skins of people. Then, there are the serious businesses, commercial buildings, stores, and private residences that are the real targets of Halloween tricks. For them, Halloween is the one night every minor spirit, forgotten phantom, and amateur poltergeist is granted a temporary permit to manifest by making a mess. For these places and their owners, Halloween means a frantic effort to manage the chaos and to make sure, while the mortal world gets enough of the spooky, the entire system doesn't get messed up too much. I now live in a state where Halloween is not as much of a deal as I had experienced in the other parts of the country. Still, even here, as the sun sets on October 31st, it is not just the beginning of the witching hour, but it is the harvest of fear, of fun, of sugar, and imagination. And I'm ready with my bags of candy, mostly chocolate, for the cute trick-or-treaters in costumes to ring my door. |
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