Susan Senator

Halloween is our family’s most important non-Jewish holiday. Oh, well, of course we do enjoy going to Ned’s family in New Hampshire for Christmas dinner, and we love Thanksgiving and our birthdays and Mother’s Day …. Well, anyway, we just love Halloween.

If all goes according to plan, Nat will come home at 3:45, leaving me just enough time before that to go with Max and Ben out to West Roxbury to the iParty store, where you can get all your Halloween needs met. Oy, do I have such Halloween needs! I am the HallowQueen (I must credit the Gay and Lesbian Alliance at Brookline High School for that perfect title!).

I have a whole vision of what we are going to do with our front yard/porch/entry hall. Max and Hannah want to hand out candy this year, which leaves me free to go with Natty and B. I already have those purple light bulbs that give your space an eerie glow. I thought I would by those battery-powered pumpkin head lights to stick into the lawn to guide trick-or-treaters and illuminate our display. Benj wants to take the skull I bought a few weeks ago, and the old plastic bones we have used over the years, and lay out the whole skeleton near the gnarled old apple tree in the front yard.

I am usually in charge of The Spiders. We took one of Ned’s larger juggling balls and dropped it into a white stocking of mine (the kind you wear with garters) and suspended that from the porch so that it looks like a giant egg sac! And then we stuck the little spiderlings all over the thing and then put a huge spider somewhere up at the top to preside over it all.

Ned hangs up his father’s bat, which is very life-like (you shouldn’t know from it, as my materal grandmother used to say). He hangs it so that when a kid opens the storm door, it swings down!

Nat, Max, and B do the spider webbing and I usually hang up a fake crow I got while back from Martha Stewart’s catalog, of all things.

Halloween has always been one of the best days of the year. I can still remember each boys’ first Halloween. I just can’t wait, and that’s all I’ve got to say.