Childhood is unique and magical. For just one short time in our lives truly anything is possible. The landmarks of growing up greet you with wonder and awe: Santa, the tooth fairy, the Easter bunny invisibly giving us magic, and I swear this magic really exists… Even if these guys don’t.
You forget this from time to time, but there are always reminders along the way.
I’ve a brother much younger than me. Brian is five years old and on leaving school the other day showed me a drawing he had made (the picture above). He sat next to me, excitably telling me all about the characters, the creatures and the events. And all the while he spoke I was reminded of the joy in Halloween. A time when a child can be brave enough to open the closet door and settle things with the monster inside once and for all.
Halloween holds some of my favourite memories growing up. It’s insanely fun to get dressed up as something evil, stay up late and scare a few people and maybe yourself along the way. When I was at school, we would have a Halloween party every year around mid-October. Some of us kids would dress up as superheroes, princesses and other ‘happy child’ costumes, but I would argue that the kids that dressed up as little terrors had the most fun. After all it was an old school, a really old school, and come Halloween it became our own haunted mansion for a day. Just a shame Vincent Price wasn’t principal, but hey. Another thing that made Halloween in school so special were the stories the kids told each other about how the building was haunted. These stories seemed to be passed down generationally so no one knew where they came from, but whether a certain classroom was haunted or a teacher was really a witch come Halloween, it became our excuse to scare the crap out of each other.
October 31st would creep in and out came the masks. I have a brother and two cousins roughly the same age and every year we would have a Halloween party at my grandparents’ house. The house was always decorated from top to bottom. On entering, it became a familiar but amazing fantasy world. It’s hard to believe but when you’re a kid all the decorations take on a life of their own. Those giant spiders hanging from cobwebs, the cauldron overflowing with sweets, the ‘warning – danger ahead’ signs spread across the garden, to me when I think back now that stuff was all totally real.
The fun really started when it got dark and we all went outside into the garden. We would bob for apples while the Halloween sky exploded overhead, like an extraterrestrial battle in space. My father would bend the handles of sparklers and hook them all over their apple tree, making it look like it was totally on fire, blazing and roaring in fury at us kids, a plant possessed. Knock, knock, knock, the door would beat every few minutes. Trick or treaters… The best ones would sing. Seeing other kids’ costumes was always a treat on its own, but trying to think of ways to scare them before they left was more a feast.
Scary stories are addictive to a child. When you enter that world you can’t leave it until you are given a sense of relief, which rarely happens. I think this is why so many children have nightmares. You just can’t escape certain images when they get in your head; whether it’s a horror movie or a spoken tale, those images can haunt you as much as any ghost. As big a movie buff as I am, I don’t think there’s anything more terrifying than a good old-fashioned spoken tale. My grandfather was amazing at this. He’d dim the lights and we’d enter a world of sound and shadows, sitting around the room, following his voice. He would give our imaginations guidance. Everyone in that room would be listening to the same story… but we would all see it in our own way.
Growing up, horror movies were always a bit of a forbidden fruit. My mother wouldn’t let us watch them, but what she didn’t know couldn’t hurt her. Like any forbidden fruit, you couldn’t stop me taking a bite of that apple, never more so than on Halloween night. Every year me and my cousin would stay up late to watch a mini-marathon of horror movies, and by the way ‘staying up late’ was not a choice after such a deadly mixture of monsters and Halloween goodies. In a way, by watching these movies, we were kind of giving our subconscious rocket fuel. It ignites the second you close your eyes and the result is an atomic bomb of nightmares with enough radiation to keep you awake for weeks. Halloween was never complete without it.
Childhood memories are like sparklers burning brightly, but lasting just long enough to give you a quick glimpse in the darkness of things forgotten. In a way that’s really the beauty of childhood; remembering things in these vivid mental snapshots reminds me how simple things once were. This year I can watch Brian on Halloween night knowing that all the things he sees and experiences will one day remind him in adulthood that magic really does exist.
© JOSEPH “JOE” GRAHAM, [2016].
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Joe Graham 