What Halloween Means to Me
Halloween has often been one of my favorite holidays, probably because autumn is one of my favorite seasons. Decorating for Halloween has always been a family activity at my house. Every year we would pull out our Halloween decorations, put on some spooky tunes, and start placing things around the house. A lot of my favorite family memories took place in October. I hope to share some of these memories with you, or at least help you to create your own Halloween decorating memories.
Coming up with a Halloween Decorating Plan
Although my family and I didn’t always plan our decorations out, we sometimes ended up designing a new Halloween decorating scheme year after year. Most of our Halloween decorating began after we bought pumpkins. So a trip to the local apple orchard, which also sold pumpkins, was a prerequisite to decorating. After we got the pumpkins home, we decided what kind of faces to draw on them.
After drawing out the outline for what kind of faces each pumpkin would have, the carving began. When I was younger, my parents would do the pumpkin carving themselves. Growing up I learned to scoop out the innards of the pumpkin, wash the pumpkin seeds, and lay them flat to dry. Depending on the year and the amount of sunshine, we would sometimes dry the pumpkin seeds by the window in the sunshine, and other times we would use the oven.
Once we had a few carved pumpkins, it was time to decide where to put them. Sometimes this involved figuring out what kind of outside decorations we wanted. For example, one year we created a scarecrow using my dad’s old clothes, and some leaves that we raked from the backyard. We decided to place one of our carved pumpkins as the head the scarecrow.
Figuring Out Inside Decorations
After we got the outside Halloween decorations, it was time to decorate the inside for our own enjoyment, or spookiness as it were. I personally enjoyed putting lots of fake spiderwebs in our windowsills. My mom might not have liked it as much, and I enjoyed putting fake spiders in each web.
It was also fun making arts and crafts decorations for Halloween. I remember making a witch out of cardboard in school. We hung the witch in our window, and it gave us a small fright every time we walked past. Sometimes we would even keep a few small pumpkins inside the house, either in the kitchen or in the living room.
Halloween Celebrates the Changing of the Seasons
I think one of the reasons that Halloween is such a memorable holiday to me, is that it seems to celebrate our humanity. First, there are so many symbols of bounty. After a harvest, we have so many vegetables and fruits to eat. That’s why we have symbols such as pumpkins and gourds, “candy” corn, and giving away sweets. This abundance obviously marked me as a child.
In addition, Halloween has a more eerie and finite feel to it. In pagan traditions, Halloween symbolizes the end of the year since winter signifies death, and where Spring is rebirth. So Halloween is like the end of the wheel. Although this might seem morbid to some, I think it’s actually comforting to know that the year is over, and there is a new one just around the corner.