I can remember Halloween being such a magical holiday when I was a kid. Picking out the perfect costume and ending up with a stockpile of candy that would last for weeks. There’s nothing not to love about that. But as I got older and aged out of trick-or-treating, I just didn’t want to deal with the holiday. Parties didn’t appeal to me; neither did handing out candy. I became a Halloween grouch — it was just one more holiday to get through before I could finally put up my Christmas tree.
But after becoming a mom, all of that changed.
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My daughter’s first Halloween was kind of a bummer.
I gave birth in the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, and that meant my daughter’s first holidays weren't normal. That included Halloween. Even though it was no longer my favorite holiday the way it had been as a kid, I still looked forward to dressing her up in an adorable costume and showing her off around the neighborhood. Like so many other motherhood milestones that year, this also was taken from me.
We decided to keep one plan we had for the holiday.
We felt safe enough to take Penelope to the pumpkin patch, where we’d be outside and able to distance ourselves from other people. It was the first time she’d ever been out in public anywhere besides the pediatrician’s office, and her tiny baby mind was blown realizing what it was like to be in the world.
She was 4 months old and immediately lit up seeing other people, laughing as we got out of the car. Watching her take in the farm animals around her and all of those pumpkins gave me that first spark of magic back that I’d been missing.
As she entered toddlerdom, it quickly became obvious I was raising a spooky kid.
It started last year, when she was 2. We were running errands at Target, and the Halloween area of the store was freshly set up. I fully expected her to be afraid of the animatronic skeleton singing a loud song like I would have been at her age, but she wasn’t. Instead, she was fascinated.
The next weekend, we came back to the store with her dad so he could see the way she reacted to even the creepiest of decorations. We ended up leaving with a 3-foot skeleton she wanted to sit in the cart with her. A year has passed, and she still carries that skeleton around the house.
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This year, she’s all in.
Halloween was celebrated all year in our house. Movies like Coraline, The Nightmare Before Christmas, and Corpse Bride quickly became part of our regular rotation — the kind of movies that would have given plenty of children older than her the creeps. The first time I showed her Beetlejuice, I halfway expected to turn it off early because it was too scary. Nope, she watched it all the way through, transfixed, and asked to watch it again when it ended.
When she’s making up stories while playing with her dollhouse, so many of those stories involve ghosts, pumpkins, and skeletons. She’s been carrying a basket around the house, saying "Trick or treat” for months. She’s perfected her creepy witch laugh. And getting to witness her find an interest on her own that had nothing to do with me has been really, really cool.
Seeing how much she loves Halloween brings back all the magic for me.
I haven’t decorated my house for Halloween in years — inside or out — but this year, I decided to do it because I knew it would make my daughter happy. And in the process, it made me happy, too. I enjoyed picking out just the right decorations and setting them up on our front porch and on the fireplace inside, with creepy, flickering battery-powered candles that Penelope immediately proclaimed were “so spooky.”
I’m excited to take her to trick-or-treat at the zoo, to go to a Halloween party a friend is throwing, and to see her dress up in her costume on the actual holiday. Like so many other things about her, this quality in my child totally blows me away — she is so brave with the way that not even the creepiest movie or decoration scares her and it amazes me every time. Seeing her believe in witches and ghosts and magic makes me want to believe, too.
And yeah, Christmas is still my favorite holiday, but Halloween now has a special place in my heart forever.
