The True Meaning of Halloween

(6:30 p.m. A dark and stormy night)

Me: Time to trick-or-treat! Hooray!

Green: I think I only want to go around the block this year.

Me: WHAT?!

Green: I want to go around the block and then go home and hand out candy.

Me: What's the matter with you? Are you sick?!

Green: Mommy, this the season of giving! And I want to give!

Me: No, Green, you’re thinking about Christmas. This is the season of getting, of taking. It’s the season of GREED!

Green: I want to go home.

Me: (heavy sigh). Blue, would you like to score tons of candy with me while your brother goes home and practices being generous?

Blue: Yes!

Me: I think you must be the kid who’s related to me. That other one, I don’t know where he came from.

(A half hour later)

Blue (getting whiny): Mommy, you need to help me carry this bucket of candy. It’s overflowing, and it’s too heavy for me.

Me: Blue, you should never complain about being too rich, too successful, or too full of candy. You were very good at getting all those ladies to pour their entire bowls of goodies into this bucket. Remember that one house where you got something like 20 Starbursts!?

Blue: It’s just too heavy. I’m done trick-or-treating. I want to go home and give out candy with Green.

Me (shrieking): Spreading the wealth!? Are you crazy? What are you, a Socialist?

Blue: Mommy, I think you might need a time out.

New Year's Eve (the Parental Version)

Back in the day, New Year’s Eve was a marker of one’s essential coolness. When asked, “What did you do for New Year’s,” you wanted your answer to stand out: “We went to Club Whatever until midnight and then sat on the beach until sunrise” or “I went to this fabulous party with the most creative, interesting people, and we made sculpture out of broken clocks by the light of the moon.” It was understood that New Year’s Eve wasn’t an ordinary night; rather, it was one that had to generate a STORY.

Well, then we had kids and lost any semblance of essential coolness. I know, I know, some of you have kids and are still cool, but we aren’t. Somewhere along the line, we decided to let our young, cool selves go into hibernation. We figure that one of these days, we’ll wake up and be revitalized, older cool people, and that will be OK. Until then, however, we’re just tired.

But New Year’s Eve is still noteworthy no matter how boring your life is, so we had the idea that we could celebrate the east coast New Year’s Eve – that way we could be wild and crazy until 9 pm and then go to bed like usual. To that end, we invited some other parents-of-a-kindergartener over to join in our nutty early evening festivities.

You may not know it, but Michael can make a mean margarita. A REALLY mean margarita, the kind that makes me pretty stupid after just a couple of sips. So it was 5:00, and the grownups were sitting around the kitchen table with a huge pitcher of lemon-lime goodness. After just a few minutes, we were giggling like kids about old prom stories (what color was YOUR tuxedo?) and bad hair and questionable fashion choices. Every once in a while, a kid would come in and ask something like, “Mama, can you take the top off of this toy?” And I would say something like, “Umm, you’ll have to wait a minute until I can reconnect my brain with my hands.”

But here’s where that essential coolness problem comes in. It’s was now 5:45, and we were all feeling kind of bad. We looked around at our disheveled selves and thought, “We could just go to sleep right now.” But, no. There were 3 hours and 15 minutes left until “New Year’s.” Wouldn’t it have been embarrassing to go to bed BEFORE the east coasters did their countdown? Wouldn’t it have been pathetic to go to bed when it was technically still daytime?

Never fear. We made it until 9. Oh yes we did. And I am proud.

All of this got me thinking about New Year’s Eves in the past, and I was startled by one memory. I’m not sure what year it was – sometime in the late 1990s. We were in Minnesota, visiting Michael’s family. New Year’s Eve fell toward the end of the trip, and all of us were feeling weary of the constant celebrating. That night’s activity consisted of sitting around together watching the Access Hollywood Year in Review special. But there was one funny twist. Michael’s sister told us that changing your underwear at midnight could bring you special luck, provided that the underwear’s color was aligned with your wish. If I remember correctly, yellow meant money, pink was love, and white was happiness. So at 11:59, all six or seven women, including Michael’s mother, took off for the back bedroom where we stripped, changed, re-dressed, and returned to the living room by the stroke of midnight.

And we’ve never spoken of it since.

I wonder, did anyone get their wish that night? Can well-chosen unmentionables bring prosperity or romance or just general good energy? Next year, I will try again. And if you find me with a wad of cash in my pocket in January 2009, you will know why.

Aftermath

We have had an exciting couple of days. It turns out that the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus were scheduled to arrive on the very same night. Yes, Green's front tooth fell out in his Cheerios on Christmas Eve morning, prompting me to sing "All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth" over and over again until Michael threatened to take my present back.

So we set out two plates of cookies, one for the Big Elf and one for the Fairy. Santa got a glass of milk, but the Tooth Fairy did not, apparently because fairies don't get thirsty. Coincidentally, I was just reading about a Tooth Fairy/Santa Claus encounter. In Father Knows Less Or "Can I Cook My Sister?": One Dad's Quest to Answer His Son's Most Baffling Questions, Wendell Jamieson tells the story of the unfortunate loss of his sister's tooth on Christmas Eve. When his sister awoke to find her tooth untouched under her pillow in the morning, she asked why the Tooth Fairy did not show up as planned. Her father told her that the Fairy did not forget-- it's just that she had been run over by Santa's sleigh. Apparently, that did not go over well. (Lucky for us, the Tooth Fairy was watching where she was going and managed to slip a little cash under Green's giant melon head).

Now, I know that every family that celebrates Christmas has its own little traditions. Some people open gifts on Christmas Eve, while some wait until Christmas day. In my family, we manage to do both. You see, my MOTHER wakes us up before the crack of dawn to open gifts, making the whole enterprise over and done with before the sun even rises. This year was no exception, and she broke a cardinal rule of parenthood which is YOU NEVER WAKE A SLEEPING CHILD.

Imagine our surprise when we heard the screech and bleat of a marching, singing toy Santa Claus at 5:20 a.m. It did not turn off until we were all out in the living room with our hands covering our ears. Fortunately, the holiday joy of small children outshines the outrage that comes from being violently uprooted from sleep.

The kids got what they wanted from Santa, and so did I. I have been coveting those cute little Flip video cameras that you can carry in your pocket, and one was waiting for me under the tree. We have a camcorder, but it's rare that I have it with me to capture the excitement of my everyday life. So be warned -- I'm going to try to get video up here, so you're likely to be exposed to a LIVE ACTION version of me cleaning the garage.

Now THAT is something to look forward to!

Merriment

Sorry about the small blogging hiatus. I was socked by my annual Christmas virus, which coincided with the end of the teaching quarter. I found myself shaky with fever, preparing for my inlaws' visit, and tackling the grading of 40 papers all at the same time.

I have a small problem when faced with big tasks. Rather than address whatever unpleasant project is at hand, I divert my attention to a different but still monumental endeavor. Here's an example. Back when I was in graduate school, we lived in this little 1960s apartment (complete with bright orange sink and avocado green gas fireplace). It also had the original refrigerator and ICE BOX. Over time, the ice box would freeze over, and the food would need to be rescued. So it was finals week, and I had 3 large research papers due on the very same day. I was woefully unprepared. On the night before the papers needed to be turned in, I decided that RIGHT THAT MOMENT I needed to chisel out the ice box. Of course, it took hours to get the ice out, and then another hour to clean up the puddles of water on the floor. Michael asked me why, when there was so much reading and writing left to be done, I would find it imperative to address the freezer situation. I shrugged. I may not have finished my work, but at least the tater tots were free from their icy prison.

So, here I was last week with those 40 papers, and it occurred to me that there had been a funky smell in the kitchen for awhile. All along I had been blaming the odor on Green's poor hygiene, but I was beginning to suspect that the problem might reside in the refrigerator. So what did I do? All the food came out, and all the shelves came out. And there, underneath the vegetable crisper boxes, I found the source of the aroma -- a small but pungent arboretum.

5 whole hours later, the ecosystem was destroyed, the appliance was pristine, and I was sufficiently disgusted. But I still had those 40 papers to deal with, and there was only one day before grades were due. When my inlaws arrived, I barely had time to raise my head out of the pile of puzzling essays (Here's one of my favorite sentences from the batch: "The purpose of American schools is to produce intelligible citizens." What? If that's the case, we are clearly failing.). But at midnight, I penciled my last grade onto the bubble form, and I was DONE.

Finally, we were able to rev up the Christmas merriment.



The boys had been antsy to visit the jolly old elf for awhile. We had been using Santa as a threat for weeks: "Blue, you need to get your dirty underpants off your brother's bed right now! Santa's watching!" or "Green, if Santa sees you hit your brother on the back of the head with that pirate sword, he's not going to bring you any presents!" Both kids were a little skeptical that one pudgy old man at the North Pole could monitor the behavior of all the world's kids at the same time. Did he have a bunch of cameras installed in everyone's house? Since I am unclear about the exact nature of Santa's surveillance equipment, I told them they should ask him themselves.

So Granny, Grandpa, Blue, Green, Michael, and I headed downtown to visit Santa. Afterwards, we rode the holiday carousel:



And we went and saw a gingerbread model of the Kremlin:



And that evening, we ate an eclectic pre-Christmas feast of grilled salmon and mashed potatoes and green beans (and ketchup). After that: presents! The boys were wild with excitement, and so was I. You see, I had found my father-in-law the perfect gift. He is a man who continues to have particularly strong views about the Clinton presidency, so I bought him a talking Bill Clinton doll. There was nothing more entertaining than watching him cringe when the doll said, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman...."

But anyway, the build up to Christmas is such a funny thing. It starts before the leaves drop from the trees, and there's such a pressure to buy, buy, buy. And in a world so full of trouble, the cheery cards that say "Peace on Earth" seem to sit in an ironic pile on the dining room table. But when you have a five year old (or two), something really does crack open when the Christmas tree lights go on for the first time, or when Santa places a candy cane in his nervous little hand. I wish I had a picture to capture the instant when Blue opened his first present from Granny and Grandpa, when he jumped in the air with his hands above his head and screamed, "Oh Granny, how did you know? How did you know this is just what I wanted?" Sometimes life can be so hard it brings you to your knees, but there are moments, like that one, when I know that everything is right and good and possible.

Thankful

Here we are just a few days before Thanksgiving. The boys have the entire week off from school, and I am struggling to maintain my sanity. Right now, if I hear them correctly, they are shooting pirate toilets across the living room. A good parent would investigate what, exactly, this activity entails. But clearly I’m not a good parent. I don’t want to know.

Once the Veterans’ Day hoopla died down at their school, the boys and their classmates moved into a unit about Thanksgiving. My volunteer work on Thursday involved helping twenty wiggly, snotty kids follow very explicit directions in a Mayflower craft project. Once again, I proved to the world that I am not astute enough to do kindergarten crafts, because I inadvertently encouraged the kids to put their glue on the front of the ship instead of the inside. I was quickly reassigned to manage a painting project in which each child was asked to add their handprint to the back-end of a turkey. I think their prints were supposed to look like feathers, but the whole thing got so smeared and drippy that it didn’t look like much of anything at all. When the teacher came by to check on things, she frowned. “It kind of resembles a peacock, doesn’t it?” I asked. She didn’t reply.

One of the last projects they did before the holiday hiatus was to write about what they were thankful for this year. Green believes that it’s important to follow directions. He understood the intent of this assignment and searched his brain for an appropriate answer. His choice? “I am thankful for having a nice mommy and daddy.” Good boy! Blue, on the other hand, decided that this assignment was a cliché. Or maybe he’s just more honest, because he produced a surprising answer to the teacher’s question. What is little boy Blue thankful for? Do you think it’s his ramshackle but warm house? His opportunity to live on the dumpy fringes of a really nice neighborhood? The abundance of organic macaroni and cheese in his kitchen? No. Blue is thankful for...

Bugs.

Yes, Bugs. I don’t know why. When I asked him about it, he said, “The idea just came to me.” OK. Bugs it is.

In the spirit of irreverent thankfulness, I’ve come up with my own list. So here are the things Jennifer is thankful for in 2007:

1) Netflix. Obviously this service is good because of its efficiency, delivering your movie selections right to your door. But for me, it’s something more. It sort of makes me feel like we have a social life, a built-in plan for the evening, even if we never really go anywhere. Netflix allows for structured TV watching. Otherwise, I fear that our nights would involve aimlessly flipping between “The Biggest Loser” and “Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders: Making the Team.” So thank you, Netflix, for adding a little quality to the time we spend staring vacantly at the box.

2) Portable DVD Players. Really, how did our parents survive without them? Have you traveled lately? Did your 3 hour plane flight with the family suddenly turn into a 7 hour odyssey? You needed one of these. The rest of the passengers needed you to have one of these. I think that all the research that says that kids’ screen time is detrimental to their health does not take into consideration the social good that results from having kids watch cartoons on an airplane.

3) Snapea Crisps. Have any of you tried this product? It’s genius. Whoever thought of the idea of taking a potato chip and dying it green and shaping it like a vegetable deserves an award. If you’re inclined toward the occasional midnight binge, this is the snack for you. If it looks like a vegetable, and you bought it at the health food grocery, it must be a vegetable. Right?

4) Senorita Margarita Hot Salt Scrub. OK, so imagine this. You’ve just faced a moral dilemma with your class of undergraduates. Upon reading their last stack of papers, you discover that they have no knowledge of the basic rules of grammar. They don’t know that “they’re” and “their” and “there” are three different words. And if you really look closely, you see that they don’t understand that splitting their ideas into different paragraphs is helpful to the reader. Complicating the issue is that this particular group of students plans to be TEACHERS. So, do you break away from your plan to investigate the ins and outs of school funding to teach grammar? Do you risk getting bad course evaluations (and therefore not getting hired again) by telling them that something they did was less than fabulous? It’s the end of this headache-provoking day, and you step into the shower. Suddenly you’re transported to the warmest, sauciest cantina in all of Mexico. The smell of this bath scrub is so good and so real, you could drink yourself.

5) Living with Tech Support. I have a lot of problems with computers. Really, the fact that I got this site up and running ALL BY MYSELF was the most amazing thing I did all year. But usually I’m not that independent, and I need to ask for help. I feel so lucky that I live with a person that has such talent with computers that he can solve just about any issue that confronts me. Plus, he’s always so cheerful when I interrupt his very important meetings to ask him how to fix the margins on a paper I’m writing.

5) You. Yes, I am so thankful for you, my loyal readers. I would love it, however, if you would let me know that you’re out there. Leave a comment. Send me a sign. What do you want to hear more about? My cauliflower butt? My hideous garage? My adventures at the gym? Let me know. Your wish is my command.

Veterans' Day

I know it seems like all I talk about are the holidays, but it's hard to avoid them this time of year. Just as the pumpkins on the front porch started to rot, the boys came home from school last week to announce another round of school-based festivities. "On Friday," they chirped, "we're going to celebrate the people in the cemetery!"

"What?" I asked. I was confused. Halloween.....er, Harvestoween had passed. The posters of mummies had been taken down. The books about feisty witches were removed from the classroom shelves. I had no idea what the boys were talking about. And frankly, neither did they.

"Are you going on a field trip to the cemetery?" I asked. They shook their heads, no. I pushed a bit more. "Well, did your teacher tell you how you were going to celebrate the people in the cemetery?" Blue answered, "She said we were going to sit criss-cross-applesauce on the floor of the cafeteria."

Ah! An assembly! "Is someone coming to talk to you?" I continued. "Yes," Green replied. "It's gonna be a soldier that plays a horn." Things were becoming clearer. I had a feeling that the arrival of the tooting soldier meant that Blue and Green were going to have their first ever lesson about war.

Michael and I have kept the boys pretty sheltered. They don't play video games. They haven't seen many movies. They don't watch the news. And they don't really know that people, if left to their own devices, are not always very nice to each other. Basically, we've done a crackerjack job of preparing them for a world that doesn't exist.

So on Friday, I anxiously sent the kids off to school to learn about Veterans' Day. I think my trepidation was influenced by my own experience with Veterans' Day assemblies. When I was a kid, veterans' organizations were working to get folks to remember the horrors of the Vietnam War. The people who came to speak to us didn't bring cheery tales of heroism. Instead, they talked about their Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. They talked about the innocent people they killed. They talked about friends that had died. It was grim and gruesome and shocking.

Apparently the message has changed over the last 30 years. This was not an assembly about war. This was a military pep rally! Blue and Green broke away from their morning lesson on squirrels to listen to the high school band play a medley of foot stomping, patriotic tunes. Then a member of the Air Force spoke about the meaning of the flag. And get this: each child was given an Air Force football as a souvenir. It's the kind of trinket that recruiters give away at their booths on college campuses. RECRUITERS.

The boys love their footballs, but they may have missed the message. On the way home from school, I asked, "Boys, what is Veterans' Day about?" Blue answered, "It's about the military." "And what's the military?" I asked. Green shrugged. "I dunno. Something about Yankee Doodle." OK, I guess they're not signing up for service just yet.

Of course, Blue and Green had some Veterans' Day homework to complete. Each weekend, a kid in the classroom gets to take home the class "pet" (a stuffed mouse puppet). The student's job is to write a booklet describing all the things that the mouse did with that particular family. And this weekend was Blue's weekend. On the way out of the classroom, the teacher said, "It would be great if you could take the mouse to do something related to the holiday. You could go to the cemetery!"

What is it about the cemetery?! No, I was not going to drag the kids and their smelly puppet around the cemetery in the rain. Instead, we went to visit one of our favorite veterans, who kindly pulled out all of his pins and medals to educate the rodent about the armed forces.


Thanks, Grandpa.

New Month

Well, phew. I’m glad it’s November. All the harvest celebrating got to be a bit much. There were the two trips to the pumpkin farm. There was the in-school party, the after-school party, the jackolantern carving, the costume buying, and the inevitable craze that was the actual day of Halloween. I’m exhausted.

I think what we need is another holiday in October to offset the maniacal build-up to Halloween. Columbus Day is clearly not helpful. It seems as if that day’s claim to fame is that all the people in the neighborhood get to wander around wondering why the mail isn’t being delivered. I’m not sure we know what to do with Columbus anymore, now that his big discovery has been challenged. In schools, teachers are left with a bunch of curriculum materials that are historically problematic. But, not wanting to waste all those “Columbus Was An Explorer. Are You An Explorer, Too?" signs, educators have simply watered down the old message without addressing the controversy. As a result, Blue and Green received a host of bland Columbus-related social studies worksheets, including one that said this:

Columbus sailed on a ship.
He landed in America.
He met the people who lived there.

Now there’s an exciting story! Way to bring the drama of history to life!

But anyway, Halloween. Trick-or-treating pulls something primal out in me. The truth is that I wasn’t ready to give it up at age 13 and would probably STILL ring people’s doorbells for candy if it were at all socially acceptable. When I was a kid, it was all about strategy. The size of the candy bar was often in inverse proportion to the size of the house. Older people often gave out TWO pieces, probably because they didn’t want leftovers. People with little kids were often too distracted by their own goblins to pay adequate attention to their candy supply. And so on. I learned how to maximize my candy acquisition in the shortest possible amount of time.

To my dismay, Blue and Green are not strategists, at least not yet. Despite my exhortations to hurry! hurry! to get the most candy, they happily ambled along. At about 7:30, after an hour and a half of reminders about the importance of saying “thank you,” Green announced that he was ready to go home. “WHAT?!” I hollered at him. “You’re done?! How can you be done?” But he was, so Michael took him back to the house. I convinced Blue that it would be worth his while to do one more block. And sure enough, I was right – he scored several more reese's peanut butter cups (his favorite). “Blue,” I told him, “you’re learning from a master.”

The sad part is that I don’t really crave the candy anymore. I’ve had a piece or two, the “fun size” kind, but I’m not crazy with lust over the remaining bowl of Hershey bars that we have sitting on the kitchen counter. When did that leave me? When did I learn to be happy with small squares of organic dark chocolate, you know, the kind with ANTIOXIDANTS? I’m certainly glad they didn’t tell me that as a child. Can you imagine the depressing high school assembly, entitled “Things You Never Guessed About Adulthood?” Here’s what they would say:

1) No matter how old you become, you will always get pimples, especially on important days.

2) McDonalds food will stop tasting good, or at the very least, it will make you feel incredibly crappy if you eat it.

And

3) You will no longer want to consume an entire bucket full of Halloween candy in one sitting, and if you do, it will feel like a shameful binge instead of a joyful celebration.

On that note, I will leave you with assorted Halloween photos:

Choosing the biggest pumpkins in the patch




Carving

Doctor Green, Doctor Blue, and Me (Not Really a Doctor)

Holiday

At Blue and Green’s school, today is Halloween. Well, it’s not really Halloween. It’s Harvestoween. We certainly would never celebrate anything connected to the underworld, but farming? Yes! We love farming! Though we all live in the city, we go to the farmer’s market every weekend to get our organic produce. So yes, let’s celebrate the farmer and his/her bountiful pesticide-free spinach.

I shouldn’t poke fun. I understand that holidays are complicated for public institutions, but this one just cracks me up. For the past week, the boys have been studying nothing but traditional Halloween symbols. They painted jackolanterns. They designed elaborate pumpkin people. The hallways are filled with signs that say, “Boo!” Last week, the school dragged all 85 kindergarteners to a rural pumpkin patch, never mind the driving windstorm and pounding rain. On our permission slip, the administration promised that this trip was intricately tied to the goals, objectives, and learning benchmarks of the kindergarten program. But in truth, the kids took a tractor ride, slid down a big slide in a hay maze, and were able to pet several bedraggled rabbits.

Besides the absence of the actual word “Halloween,” several other things have changed about this holiday since I was a kid. First, the children are not allowed to wear full costumes to school. Instead, they can only decorate their heads. I assume this rule emerged to make costumes less distracting, but I’m not so sure that’s working. I saw one girl this morning who fashioned her long hair into a foot tall palm tree on top of her head. It was painted green and had noisy, dangling coconuts on it. Another little boy almost peed in his pants because he was so excited about wearing hair products for the first time. “Look at me! Look at me!” he shrieked at the top of his lungs. I overheard his teacher say, “Brent, you need to sit down and take out your homework.” “I can’t,” he responded. “I’m wearing mousse!”

The other thing that is different about Halloween is that there's no candy. Instead of in-school trick-or-treating, Blue and Green are going to experience a healthy food bonanza at their classroom party. I told the boys that they weren’t going to need their lunchboxes today, because each child was bringing in a wholesome dish to share. “What about dessert?” Blue asked. “Ummm,” I stammered, “Your friend Linus is bringing in dried apricots, and some people might consider that a dessert.” “Mama,” Blue said, “An apricot is fruit. Don’t you know that?”

Well, yes, I know that. I am also aware that as I write this, my picky-eater boys are struggling over whether to a) go hungry or b) eat the mini soy corndogs that Lucy brought in, or c) try the honey dew melons that Schroeder contributed, or d) sample the “mini raisin lemon pancakes” that Pigpen’s mother stayed up late last night to make. I have a sense that Green is going to stomp out of his classroom this afternoon and announce, “Harvest time is no fun.”

Another problem with this holiday is that it is being muscled out by Christmas. When I was at the drugstore the other day looking for appropriate head decorations for the boys, I found one measly aisle devoted to Halloween. But if you were out that day looking for a wreath or a stocking or some reindeer wrapping paper, you would have been in good shape. And if you were really paying attention, you would have heard the instrumental version of “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” being piped over the airwaves, just to get you ready for when he really does come to town in TWO MONTHS.

And of course, all this ho!ho!ho! retail spirit is getting the kids geared up for greediness. Blue and Green are already hard at work on their Christmas lists. In particular, Blue wants a custom-made, gas powered garbage truck that he can drive up and down the neighborhood streets. “Uh, Blue,” I said to him, “I don’t think Santa will have room in his sleigh to bring a garbage truck of that size.” “He’ll make room, Mama,” Blue replied. “You told me that Santa is magic.”

Maybe the Christmas rush starts so early to give parents enough time to work themselves out of moral dilemmas like this one. But, just in case, I have to ask: Does anyone have a spare garbage truck they could donate? The stinkier it is, the better.