Halloween memory

Dead Head
Originally uploaded by raygrasso.

I had a rumage around Flickr for photos of Halloween. There are tons of them. Many pictures are of adults dressing up as vampires, witches, skeletons, devils. Many of the masks are grotesque and horrible. White makeup and black lipstick seem to be the order of the night.

There were also some photos of some very young children with white painted faces, and dark sunken eyes. Their faces were wan, and a sadness was in their eyes. Party time. Time to go out and enjoy yourselves, and collect sweets. Carnival

The one halloween I remember as a child was when my grandmother tried to do something special for me. I must have been five at the time. She hung some decorations outside the bedroom window. The decorations were the concertina type that you pull out and hang up at christmas. Nothing wrong with that. There was a slight breeze and the decorations made a strange rustling noise against the window. The sodium street lamp shone through the decorations and the the cutout patterns cast strange shadows on the bedroom wall.

If the shadows had remained still it might have been OK, but since the decorations were moving in the wind, the shadows in the bedroom moved about, and I could easily imagine hollow eye sockets and sharp teeth. Phantoms in the room with me. It scared me. I could not go to sleep, but instead watched the shadows flicker on the walls. If I shut my eyes for a moment the window would be broken and evil would rush in and get me. I asked my grandmother to take the decorations down since they frightened me. She explained it was only the wind and the yellow streetlamp and that I should not be afraid. I cried and pleaded for them to be taken down, and in the end they relented and went out and removed the decorations from outside the window. I was terrified. Terrified by shadows. The unknown was outside my window tapping to get in.

Is it not odd that parents who do everything in their power to protect their children from evil, from violence on TV, who prohibit them from playing video games that involve death and mayhem, who walk them safely to school and back again, who protect and cherish them, on this one night of the year dress their little angels up as devils, and instill in them the stuff of nightmares.

Unhappy halloween to everybody.