"HALLOWEEN - Offpiste Humor"
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HIGH on ADVENTURE

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2024, OUR 28TH YEAR

 
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HALLOWEEN

 
   
Humor Column by Noma d’Plume
 
 

I love autumn. Maybe it’s because I’m a November baby. I adore corn mazes, pumpkin carving, chai tea lattes with a hint of pumpkin spice, sturdy soups, falling leaves, spending an entire day making Thanksgiving pies, and those cool, crisp mornings that mark the changing of the season.

  Mother and father time  

Due to my fall fetish, our Halloween décor remains on display for days after the last trick-or-treater has vacated our porch. We tend to go all out, partly because our direct neighbors are all Halloween no- shows. The neighbors to our left have been teaching overseas for several years, so their house is only occupied during the summer school break. The neighbors to the right don’t celebrate Halloween.

And our across-the-street neighbors spend half their time—which always seems to overlap with Halloween—at their second home.

 

So, on the big night, we try to pick up the neighborhood slack. We’ve got creepy tombstones dotting the yard, luminarias brightly burning on the steps, and a minimum of three huge carved pumpkins. Oh, and full-sized candy bars! Any kid who ventures down our street past those boring, no-treat houses is going to be rewarded with the good stuff at ours. And, after you’ve given out a few full-sized bars, word spreads.

Last year, I remember one kid yelling at the end of our driveway, “They’re giving out big candy bars!” He shouted it with the same joy and astonishment as “I just won the lotto!” And, I suppose, discovering the full-sized-candy-bar house is a kid’s version of hitting the jackpot.

  We usually see a lot of trick-or-treaters (118 this year) because ours is the only neighborhood in a rural-ish area dotted with farms. We’re the only place for miles where you can walk door-to-door without hiking boots and a compass. Our neighborhood of 100 homes also has no “through” streets. There’s only one way in and out of the neighborhood, so traffic is light, making the streets fairly safe for little ghouls and witches.   Round head Halloween costume  

Another draw is that one of the few other houses on our street that goes BIG for Halloween puts on a “Star Wars” show every 15 minutes. The “stage” is the home’s two-car garage, which has been renovated to look like a high-tech spaceport. The homeowners announce the shows on social media, so a lot of folks turn up for the pageantry. And this isn’t a hokey little playlet by a couple of “Star Wars” enthusiasts. This is an all-out, smoke-machine-spewing, light- show-flashing, fully scripted,  authentically costumed, musically scored, droid-studded, drama-filled extravaganza culminating in a choreographed light saber battle between Darth Vader and Rey Skywalker. Spoiler alert: Good triumphs over evil.

  But now that Halloween is over, we’re heading down the stretch to Thanksgiving. I have to say, I prefer Halloween: no house cleaning, no struggling to time the turkey and side dishes to all be ready at the same time (it’s a nail-biter every year), no mountain of dishes to tackle once the family departs with leftover-filled to-go containers.   Six-limb Halloween costume  

At least we’re cooking for my family this year. They’re easy. Hubby’s family is a little tougher. His immediate family has two vegans, one vegetarian, one pescatarian, and one who hates almost everything except my broccoli-cheese bake and pecan pie.

Vegan cooking is not my forte. We tried a semi-vegan Thanksgiving one year, but the “creamy, no-dairy” mashed potatoes solidified into a brick once they cooled and the vegan stuffing was too dry to choke down. The tofurky was okay... if you’ve never tasted real turkey before. I didn’t want to attempt vegan desserts, so we all just pretended that the pecan pie didn’t have butter and eggs in it. The vegans were somewhat placated by the fact that the eggs came from my sister’s extremely spoiled and pampered chickens. I mean, c’mon, my sister makes her chickens a huge pot of warm oatmeal on cold mornings. They’re living their best lives.

I’m living my best season and looking forward to the holidays. And if things get too hectic, I can  always add a little rum or brandy to my pumpkin spice latte.

 
 
About the author:
 
 

A woman of a certain age, Noma d’Plume lives in a beautiful, rainy, semi-rural corner of the Pacific Northwest. She enjoys baking/making things that start with the letter “P” (pecan pie, pumpkin-chocolate-chip bread, peanut brittle, pound cake), gardening, bowling ambidextrously, traveling to supposedly haunted places, and browsing second-hand bookshops.

 

Plume inkwell