There are magazines galore at the grocery check out lines with photos of cute baked goods and adorable Halloween crafts. But really, you can’t bake anything for your treat or treaters these days. Save them for the party you can’t quite figure out when to have. This weekend? Or next weekend, which is November already, and Halloween will be over and done with and you will be so tired of candy corn that you won’t be able to stand the sight of it until next September. So call in a few friends and pour some enchanted elixirs this weekend, and remember the glory days of your misspent youth. Be sure to keep a few rolls of toilet paper on hand, just in case your guests decide they want to trick instead…
It’s hard to get excited about Halloween once you have gotten out of elementary school. The visions of candy bars and popcorn balls and UNICEF pennies gathered up in the dark, shadowy neighborhood on a cold night, coupled with the anxiety that you might have to wear a winter coat over your costume – the costume you have been imagining and planning for almost a year – is a hope only truly enjoyed by the very young. And then comes that four-year spate of wild parties in college. We used to host our own pre-party before the annual big frat Halloween party – so we could have the delightful anticipation and planning of wearing two costumes in a single evening. Ah, youth. So much creativity! So much fun!
My children zippity-doo-dahed through their childhood Halloweens in record time. How quickly they graduated from shyly ringing 3 or 4 doorbells on our street, to working out spread sheets and routes for maximizing chocolate to walk ratios that efficiency experts would weep to have devised. (At least they didn’t have GPS back then.) We still remember the year there was a rumor that the famous lawyer who lived in the gaudy mansion on the river was giving out full-sized Milky Ways. (Or was it dollar bills? Hmmm…) Never mind that it was a mile-long trek to that house built on frivolous law suits, and that Cleopatra’s slippers wore out on the way back home. Abundant, quality candy was the goal, and score they did. We parents trudged along behind the eager sugar prospectors with our Little Red Wagons, pulling tired children, and sleepy children, and petulant tired and cranky sugared-up children along with coolers of warming beers that we distributed among ourselves along the way.
Miss Morning Glory and I will take up our familiar positions this Halloween. The thrill is gone, I must say. Next Thursday night we will be sitting in lawn chairs at the end of her driveway, waiting for the 7 kids who Trick or Treat on our street on All Hallows Eve. Our street is b-o-r-i-n-g. There are 3 kids on the corner, 3 next door to us, and 1 more up across the street in the cul-de-sac. The little neighbors come a calling at 5, middle school at 5:16 (they don’t want to risk association with the little kids). The crowd moves up the main street onto the side streets where people decorate, wear masks, and have corn mazes, and dry ice, and bowls of slimy spaghetti and olives. Miss Morning Glory and I will sip cheap white wine until 6:30 and then disappear into our bat caves to watch Brian Williams wax poetical about sad dog stories. We might even test some of our own quality chocolates, bought to remember the good old days of yore. (And quite a few years have sped by since my mother gave out boxes of raisins for heaven’s sake! The shame of that Halloween still haunts me!)
I wonder sometimes about having another Halloween party. If I lived in a big, creaky, old Victorian house that had remarkably updated 21st century plumbing and kitchen appliances. Maybe something like the Addams family’s house. I could slink around in a black cobwebby dress, and speak French, while feeding my Venus Flytrap. It could be an elegant party, with good nibbles and some themed drinks to sip decorously between dances and strolls in the moonlight with my personal vampire slayer. Here are a few that I would like to include in my menu:
Zombie Punch
10 ounces vodka
5 ounces triple sec
2 ounces bitters
1 cup fresh squeezed blood orange juice
2 cups black cherry soda
Grenadine, for rim
Mix in a large punch bowl. Hand out sparingly.
To make a punch bowl steam and smoke like a good B movie: use two nesting bowls, a smaller one for the punch, the other to hold the dry ice. Be sure to use gloves when handling the dry ice – you have a few stakes to drive home tonight.
Bloody Type O Positive Martini
2 ounces dry vermouth
8 ounces premium gin
Ice cubes
4 Pickled Baby Beets, each placed on a cocktail skewer
Make 4 martinis your own special way, but garnish with the pickled beet, which will start to bleed into the drink. Gaudy and garish!
Spy Special Bloody Marys
3 cups tomato juice
3 tablespoons freshly grated or drained prepared horseradish, plus more for garnish
1/2 cup vodka
2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce
Juice of 1 lemon
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
Hot sauce
Celery – for garnish
Mix everything in a big frosty pitcher and pour into tall zombie glasses for maximum effect. Stir with celery; a green, leafy vegetable.
“First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys.”
― Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes
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