Daily Cascade

On Halloween

Prompt: Halloween
Can you remember your earliest memory of the Halloween season? If not, write about what can make a Halloween trick or treating memorable? Or do you wish other nations could also enjoy Halloween and the month of October?

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It's been such a long time and I don't believe I recall anything about an earliest memory. According to my mother though, I must have asked if the Thanksgiving Turkey had become a ghost. Go figure a kid's mind!

To me, what made trick-or-treating memorable was the trick or treaters ringing our door, much later, and my older son refusing to go trick or treating because it was embarrassing for him to beg for candy. Yet, the younger one couldn't wait for it and would be jumping up and down with excitement. To this day, my two sons are each other's opposites in just about everything.

I am not sure what I wish for other nations in regard to Halloween, but I wish they would stop their fighting and their wars before establishing a Halloween or any other holiday.

Still, some do celebrate Halloween, but by wearing different masks. I heard, in some places, it is a candlelight vigil and in another, a masked carnival. In other words, our Halloween friend the pumpkin is replaced by a turnip in Germany, a sugar skull in Mexico, a paper lantern in Japan, and a glowing LED mask in Nairobi.

Their common thread is a fearful night when ordinary rules loosen, when the lines between the living and the imagined blur. This is when the small villages in the Irish countryside or megacities in Tokyo come together to confront the darkness with a smile, a snack, and a story. After all, what's more fun than treating a dark night with a good story!