This week is the best time of the year. Other seasons are great, but nothing beats the first weeks of fall.
Halloween features long nights and short days, and the probability that imaginations become bizarre. Most people like to be scared, and Halloween’s a perfect occasion for that.
Here’s why this season is great:
Things change. We leave the house early, often needing to scrape our windshields. We don a coat because of the icy car seats, but by the time we arrive at work, it’s time to turn on the AC.
What I enjoy most is the variation. I believed we’d all moved to Phoenix last Sunday when we sat in hot Perkins Stadium bleachers to watch a women’s soccer game. A half hour later, all of us were shivering.
As I’ve written in this space before, in my youth, my mom was a triple-bagger, not in the sense of being a baseball player who smacks mostly three-base hits. No, my triple-bagging mother wouldn’t let us leave the house on fall mornings unless wearing 1) an undershirt, 2) a thick wool or cotton shirt and 3) a sweatshirt.
The jacket that we stuck through our belts was extra; otherwise Mom would have been a quadruple-bagger. Mom’s period of “I don’t want you to get cold, Hijito” exempted only July and August.
Halloween season is great because of its unpredictableness: cold in the morning, steaming in the afternoon; the change from DST to standard time; the turning of the leaves, made more spectacular on a drive through the Mora Valley; the change in colors of license plates, as the white Texas plates give way to the yellow New Mexico plates at camping sites.
Also a treat is listening to the folklore and the myths and mitos (a mito is Spanish for myth, which must mean that mitote is a huge myth, a whopper) concerning Halloween.
For years, as a teacher, I’d schedule a late-afternoon class that let out as dusk approached, 5:30-ish. The darkening sky conduced to discussing students’ opinions about Halloween, that pagan ritual that has evolved into a kid-friendly, candy-filled fest.
Most common among what Oct. 31 had in store: a priest, a young girl and a nun were going to be kidnapped on Halloween. It hadn’t happened the year before but was bound to occur this time.
Heard that one? For virtually all my 28 years in the classroom, I listened as some students made that their public-speaking assignment, and swore it was going to happen. Generally, the source of the upcoming abductions was a FOAF, which stands for a “friend of a friend,” who “has it on good authority.” One of the three today would be tough to kidnap, as there are nun around anymore.
The daily press has had some interesting takes on Halloween myths, ranging from kids’ receiving apples with embedded razor blades, heroin-laced candy apples, perverts roaming the streets as kids trick-or-treat.
Once I told my students that I’d found myself on East Central Avenue in Albuquerque Halloween eve, when a tight-skirted Lady of the Evening approached me and hollered, “Trick or trick.”
That too was a myth; it never happened — honest — but at least it got a laugh, the first time I mentioned it. Or at least a groan.
The Internet carried an article this week on 13 Halloween myths. Interesting that the publication chose 13, as that’s supposed to be the unluckiest number; notice many hotels in big cities omit that number. And one of the words people like to drop at parties is “triskaidekaphobia,” which contains roots meaning three, plus 10 plus fear, meaning the fear of 13, or just plain superstition.
Most of the research I came across insists a child’s much more likely to get hit by a car than to receive an apple with a blade in it. Yet, hospitals have offered to x-ray children’s stashes of candy to reassure children their Reese’s Pieces are safe. Strange that in some places this service is offered free, but try to get an x-ray to determine whether you have a fractured tibia and it costs you a fortune.
To me, the most intriguing myth, one that I heard for the first time this week, specifies that consuming Almond Joy candy bars prevents cancer. According to the writer of the myth-busting article, about the only thing eating that candy really will prevent is weight loss.
How did that urban legend begin? Did someone — possibly an employee of the Almond Joy Company — start a rumor that people bought in to? That assuredly would lead to increased profits, and possibly a promotion.
But regardless of any claimed carcinogen-fighting properties of these sweets, I wonder whether the originator of the tale is related to those who also claim they knew the woman whose “ratted” hairdo became a breeding ground for black widow spiders and tarantulas, or the woman who visited too many tanning salons and microwaved herself to death.
And how about efforts to have the church revise the Lord’s Prayer ever so slightly, by changing “give us this day our daily bread” to “give us this day our daily chicken”?
Think about it: the current version favors bread-selling corporations. Could the Tyson Chicken Corp. benefit by the constant repetition of “chicken”?
Well, the story goes that the poultry providers made such a request, but were told that Wonder Bread had already invested millions to keep the Lord’s Prayer exactly the way it’s always been.
And that is a behemyth, almost as good as the cancer-fighting properties of Almond Joy.
Enjoy Halloween, but remember — the amount of candy our kids will eat this week is directly proportional to the number of cavities we’ll be paying to fill a few months down the road.