Backward, turn backward,
O Time, in your flight
make me a child again
just for to-night!
~Elizabeth Akers Allen
I have always loved Halloween. As a child, I can remember dressing up f0r school and being excited ALL day about trick-or-treating in the evening. I was not just excited about getting candy, but also seeing other children in costumes, being allowed out in the dark with my friends, seeing the neighbours and maybe even seeing a friendly witch riding a broomstick in the sky. Oh sure, there were some scary things on Halloween…like the ‘haunted house’ on my street. Even in the summer, we were told stories about the ghosts that lived there. We dared each other to ring that doorbell. Nobody was ever home.
I was sad that one day I would be too old to go trick-or-treating, because for me, there was nothing more fun than getting dressed up and going from house-to-house. Fortunately, when I lived in university residence, the tradition continued as on-campus trick-or-treating was organized!
Now that I’m an adult, I’m happy to be able to go out on Halloween again with my two young children, the youngest who will be going for her first time tonight and the eldest who asked me shortly after she woke up this morning, “How many more minutes until I can go trick-or-treating?” I told her it would only be a few hundred more and what’s a few hundred minutes when you’ve been waiting all year?
Happy Halloween!
