...a cute smiley Halloween witch doll, a Fisher Price postal box, a child-sized waste basket shaped like a trash can, a plastic bath toy boat, classroom-type A-B-C posters, more running shoes.
I really like the witch doll. She is friendly-looking, though I realize this runs counter to Halloween, which is meant to be scary. I probably always had some issues with Halloween's scary element, but they were exacerbated when I was in 5th grade (forgive me, those of you who have heard this story). My teacher, Mrs. Cooper, sat the class down the day of Halloween and cautioned us: people were putting LSD and other drugs in Halloween candy, thinking it was funny. We all knew it was possible to overdose on drugs - look at Janis, look at Jimi. So we were to scrutinize every piece of candy for tampering and not eat any that were questionable. Mark Cass raised his hand and said lots of drugs were used with a syringe, and who could be expected to notice a pin-prick-sized mark on a candy wrapper? I think he meant it as, There's no chance we could detect it so we may as well eat whatever we want. To me it meant that we could be as careful as could be and still be drugged.
Thus I had my first anxiety-ridden Halloween, expecting at any moment for my sisters or brother to drop in a writhing mass at my feet under the influence of some mind-altering substance. I had respite the next year when we were in Scotland. Guy Fawkes Day was their Halloween, and the Scots weren't prone to generating urban legends about people hurting children in this manner. They preferred ghost stories about women in veils with disfigured faces. But that's another story.
Back in the States for seventh grade, I was so tied in knots about Halloween that I didn't go. I couldn't bear the drawn out anxiety of my younger sisters walking up to first one house and then another, over and over, wondering each time if they'd come back the same. I believe I told my mom that I didn't want to ruin their fun by warning them and perpetrating the same misery on them as had been perpetrated on me, but would she please check their candy?
I don't suspect Halloween candy foul play anymore, but that feeling associated with Halloween has remained with me in a slightly different form. I tense up, wait for it to be over, and am somehow extra relieved when we survive intact. (My therapist friends are thinking, Sounds like a job for EMDR. They're probably right.) So, I appreciate happy witches and ghosts that remind me Halloween can be fun, benign even.
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