“It just doesn’t feel like Halloween this year,” my daughter said on the morning of October 31.
The ghosts that we’d made from an old sheet were hanging in the tree beside our driveway. We’d read Halloween books. We’d baked pumpkin bread. We’d carved five jack-‘o-lanterns on the mudroom floor the previous afternoon. This same daughter had put together a Halloween party for her sisters, including bobbing for apples, a pumpkin toss, and a scavenger hunt.
Despite our best intentions, we’d missed the Middlebury Spooktacular – a chance to gather in costume on the Town Green and trick-or-treat at local businesses. Every year, we plan to attend the Spooktacular, and every year, for one reason or another, we end up skipping it, to the point that it’s not Halloween unless we miss the Spooktacular (which may be a good thing, since the one year we succeeded in attending the Spooktacular, my father fell from the birch tree he was cutting in our yard and fractured several ribs and vertebrae while we were out!)
But, apparently, it still didn’t feel like Halloween to my daughter.
The Pickle Patch 