I had a zombie in my front yard. I admit this sheepishly because, as I told my children when they showed me, “I’m not pleased with that.” It was the day before Halloween, and they had assembled an ominous sheet-covered hump under our aspens. Creepy purple lights and polyester spider webs surrounded it. “Is it scary? Does it look real?” they kept asking me as I stared scrunch-nosed and disapproving.
It looked so real I expected one of their friends to sit up and belch. “Is there really someone under there?”
They were gleeful that I had even asked.
“It’s going to scare little kids,” I said. Just the point, they assured me.
I tried to mitigate the scary factor by hanging happy decorations near the door, hoping the little ones coming for candy wouldn’t notice the scene in the aspen grove. My wise neighbor Ralph laughed at my squeamishness: “They’re boys, Natalie; it’s a big night for them.”
Because there seems to be some residual crankiness hovering around after the election, and because we need to clean it up before Christmas comes, I’d like to remind everyone that big kids are kids too. And all kids should get to pretend to be as scary, or as beautiful, or as magical as they can possibly imagine.
All kids should get to play at having more control and power than they do, as if they are the monsters under the bed, the bad guy under the window, the beautiful witch. For one night they take charge, in some metaphoric way, of their imaginations.
By 5 p.m. the night buzzed full of candy and sweetness, goodwill, and, yes, monsters. I bent down to more than one 4-year-old to explain the white lump under the trees. “Look, I said, under the sheet it’s a sled and a pair of Crocs sticking up. Look, the head is a soccer ball.”
You’re ruining it, my sons and their friends insisted. I shooed them away to finish carving pumpkins. (They used power drills instead of serrated knives.)
After they had put the drills away, and it was solid dark outside, my kitchen full of 14-year-old boys helped one another adjust and pin and tie their costumes. There was a giant ape with a blue beehive hairdo; a hockey- masked, scythe-handed, scary guy in a three-piece suit; a chap dressed up in a green money suit with diamonds around his neck; and a black- and- white-clad, hungry-looking alien.
I leaned on my counter and watched them hardly needing my help. They were changing into not only costumes, but new skins — zooming away from boyhood — like fruit in short season, their movements toward fully grown so sharp and sudden that I wondered how their bones could bear the weight.
As they left through my front door, they towered under the porch light, almost filling the space. Then they shifted their big feet aside to let the little ones through and, bashful with their bags and anticipation, ran to trick-or-treat.
Not everyone was pleased to see them coming. I’d like to pass a message here to the lady who told the tall, skinny eighth-grader he was too old for trick-or-treating and sent him away after giving candy to everyone else on her doorstep: Please rethink your rigidity.
The lives of children are Halloween-scary every day. Teens are expected to turn navigate a crooked maze of school, family, friends and street drugs, sex too early, expectations too high, grades too low, pressure to fit in, step up, settle down and grow up.
Give them a break. They are as fragile as the little ones, and then some. People who think childlike activities are only for the children under 10 need to find a way to be less cranky.
If big kids want to put on costumes and trick-or-treat, if they want to lace themselves to a memory of childhood as they are so speedily growing up, more power to them. I applaud their sense of fun. Now that Christmas is coming, all of us should find ways to act like big kids. It’s important for the soul; grab joy as it passes. Snatch it and hold it close.
E-mail Fort Collins poet and writer Natalie Costanza-Chavez at grace-notes@comcast.net. Read more of her essays at .
