Scary-Boo!

Well, almost two weeks and two hard-drives later, my laptop appears to have rejoined the living. As it is Halloween, I hope you will forgive me for this cliche...

"It's alive! A-L-I-V-E!!"

Halloween is (after Christmas of course) Zachery's favorite holiday. Its not just the copious amounts of candy that gets him excited, but the complete combination package of dressing up in scary costumes, wandering around the darkened streets...and then eating until the sugar drives every brain cell into wailing overdrive.

I suspect that kids, like most adults, see Halloween as that one time of year that they can actually live out the illusion of being someone else, even it it is only for a moment.

Zack decided several weeks ago that his costume of choice this year would be Darth Vader. I've long since given up trying to steer him towards dressing as a hero of a good guy. I admit that as a parent I sometimes have distinct qualms with his fascination with "the bad guys", but Halloween has to be "spookying" as Zachery puts it, so Darth Vader was not a complete surprise.

We had hacked up a pumpkin almost two weeks before, slopping pumpkin innards all over the kitchen table and leaving a trail of wayward pumpkin seeds strewn arond the house. Like always, our pumpkin was half-rotted by the time Halloween actually arrived, mainly due to Zack's impatience with waiting to carve it. If I had allowed it, we would have been carving pumpkins in September...

At a Halloween party earlier in the week, Zack had acquired yet another pumpkin, so after picking him up from school, I decided that we should carve this one in a special way. We cut the usual frightening pumpkin face (actually, with my poor carving ability it was somewhat less than frightening, tending more towards indifferent or laughable...) and then cut a large hole in the back of it. My wife, with her usual excess zeal, had purchased a smoke machine last year for Zachery's Halloween party, so we removed the plastic skull on the front and inserted the machine into the back of the pumpkin. One flashlight and one quick extension cord later, we had a glowing, fuming masterpiece of a pumpkin sitting on the front steps.

Zack was well pleased, and after trekking around the neighborhood, tripping over steps, bashing his father liberally with his lightsaber, announcing to all and sundry at one house that he was" the king of spooky" and filling his candy sack (an old pillowcase) with munchables, we returned home to sit on the steps, eat Rockets and give away candy - all the while filling the air with as much dense fog as this small machine could put out.

The only downside was that the fog mainly boiled out of the pumpkins nose rather than its mouth or eyes...Not quite the scarifying effect we sought.

After filling up on candy and, very probably, making his own future contribution to his dentist's retirement to the South Seas, my wife put our very own excitable Darth Vader to bed...with his bag of candy beside him. Obviously he doesn't trust his sugary snacks around his Dad.

Wise boy.

Comments are always welcome. You can reach me at dadchronicles(at)hotmail.com.