THIS IS HALLOWEEN
OCTOBER is:
ALL HALLOWEEN — ALL THE TIME!
Because….Halloween is my one of my favorite holidays!
Growing up one of my favorite board games was called WITCH, WITCH? (which – if anyone can tell me where I might find this game again, I’d love you for it!) There also used to be a pinball game called Haunted House and I’d love to find it again, too!) I have always loved watching Scooby-Doo’s scary mysteries and every Bugs Bunny cartoon that featured monsters, mystical people or space characters. (hmm… how many times did I use the word love in this paragraph, could it be a clue? Ya think?)
When I was a kid I’m sure all the other kids thought I was nuts because if I went to a local carnival or theme park I more or less ignored the big, spectacular rides and headed for the “dark Rides”, as they are called. Dark rides are the kind of attraction where one climbs into a rickety, little cart that is guided along a track. One enters the ride by pushing through a set of eerily silent or appropriately squeaky double doors (painted with dragons or devils or clown faces.) into the dark interior of the scary house, as we called it. It always had a particular smell: dust and grease mixed with a slightly moldy scent and perhaps a touch of sawdust. Funny how you remember those things. Even now as a BIG kid I still get that frission of excitement up my spine before the double doors open up and I enter the dark coolness of the ride. To this day, I still hesitate to sit in the front seat of the little cart.
At Disney my favorite rides are Peter Pan and The Haunted Mansion. I remember being very aggravated when the people around me wouldn’t shut up long enough to be able to hear the narrator tell the tale of the mansion…dare I say that it is narrated by the great voice of Orson Wells? It just goes to show you that we may well have lost our ability to be impressed by magic unless the magician cuts the lady in half and she never recovers, then we sit up and take notice. (And after the show is over talk for hours about how much blood there was.) In this age of technology not even the great 007 comes up with awe-inspiring gadgets anymore. With so much TV programing, so much access to information (certified and fictitious) via the net, we have a hard time just — believing, suspending reality for a few minutes and allowing ourselves to be swept up in the possibility of magic, of something out of our control or understanding, of something that we can’t explain.
Perhaps the reason I love Halloween is because for one night our innocence peeks out out again and we can allow ourselves to suspend reality, let our over-informed minds rest and just have fun playing a character. We might even admit that we can all still be scared by things unseen and that maybe, just maybe, the veil between the worlds really is thinner than we might imagine…especially on All Hallows Eve…
What do you think…just a thought I caught passing by.
Halloween rocks! We got to go to Disney for the first time this past June (my kids are 3, 7, and
and we LOVED the Haunted Mansion. I always have had a thing for spooky houses. As a matter of fact in one week we are going to a Haunted Trail. This time of year is the best!