We had a really lovely Halloween. I had planned a really great group costume for the kids, except sources and supply chains were not as reliable or as speedy as I had hoped and I had left things too late and was too busy to be able to truly do a great job at what I wanted. Maybe next year.
We started out with one very unhappy (very hot) astronaut.
We had some really great mesh "armor" and some plastic plate "shields" as well as red velvet capes, but the boys were having none of it. Any of it. So we had two small but mighty and very minimally accessorized knights, and an opinionated and very excited Elsa.
I guess it still kind of themed, along the lines of
castle/princess/medieval-ish? I wasn't sure if there would be much of a
Halloween celebration this year, what with Covid, but it turns out we
live in a wonderful little community. In no other city could I imagine
these little pockets of community like this, especially the one in Happy
Valley, where smack dab in the middle of the most urban city scene you
could imagine, loads of fully dressed up families and kids and parents
are traipsing around from store front to store front, picking up candy. Lola and I bumped into the famous dinosaur prowling the streets!
I took Lola trick or treating and we got candy from a grocery store, Chinese herbalist shop, a pet store, a bakery, a restaurant... what generosity of spirit and kindness from these stores, especially given what a tough financial environment this year has been, and the sheer number of people that were going through! It really touched me. We went to the playground with the kids first, and then meandered to the race course where we saw lots of people dressed up and having fun.
The whole scene had a very deep impact on Lola as well, in several ways. Not only is she now convinced that ALL of these stores are candy stores (she remarked to me afterward, wide eyed, "I had no idea there were SO MANY candy shops there!") but she declared she LOVES Halloween. She also had one of the most epic and crazy meltdowns that night, probably a combination of the highs from the processed sugar she never gets + the excitement of such a fun and vivid experience + the tiredness from walking around the neighborhood but also not getting to sleep until waaaay too late. Ah, Halloween.
It made me happy though to see how much she was enjoying it. What intense pleasure and joy, what sweetness and innocence, there was in her discovery. In retrospect, despite the screaming and sobbing meltdown that occurred later that night, the contented sigh that Lola gave when she plopped herself down on our mat and declared "I'm so happy!" after getting her first bag of candy on the playground alone was enough to make me think that it was all worth it.
A week later and while I was putting Lola to bed and we were chatting, she piped up with the fact that she loved Halloween, probably more than her birthday, and more than Christmas. Hmmm. I think that this may just be an example of a recent experience overshadowing a long faded memory, as throughout the year she has been asking impatiently why she has to wait so long for her birthday, and why is her birthday so far away? Good thing that special occasion is coming up soon!
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