Crisp, candy-red and tangerine leaves snap and crunch beneath my feet.  Apples lie beneath the tree, warming in the dappled sun, their sweet and tangy scent drifting like a cloud before me.  As I follow the dirt path through the park and to my childhood home, childhood memories of the harvest season warm my soul with a golden brown sensuous feast of warm and sweet, crisp and crunchy, all mixed up with a touch of anticipation for that final day in October when the veil between the world of the living and the world of the dead becomes thin enough for the ghosts to slip through…

The harvest season is my personal favorite of all our traditional family celebrations.  In my childhood home, from the beginning to end of October our house was filled with the smells of roasting pumpkin seeds, baked squash, baked apples and sweet potatoes, and every flavor of sweet bread imaginable.  I remember sitting on the porch swing with my eyes closed, the sun on my face, my mouth watering as the exotic scents of cinnamon, nutmeg and ginger drifted through the front screen door. 

My mother is an accomplished seamstress who sewed elaborate costumes for her four children using scores of patterns she kept in an old shoe box.  She stacked a variety of fabrics on dozens of shelves and bookcases that lined the walls of the sun porch. She skillfully transformed us into pirates and ghosts using old clothes, scarves, costume jewelry, and worn-out bed sheets.  And during those elementary years when the classroom parade took place and we marched from room to room twirling in a ballerina costume or dipping and curtsying in a princess gown, those were the years my siblings and I were the ones inspiring whispers behind raised hands and the ones the other parents glared at with envy—which, I am absolutely certain, was my mother’s intention.

And later that evening, when the sun had set and a fat moon lit the sky, our fun began. My older sister and I spent hours on our trick or treat adventures.  We knocked on every door in our neighborhood and all surrounding neighborhoods.  In my family, trick or treat wasn’t about the candy, it was about volume.  We counted the candy as it was dropped into our bags, held each other’s bags to see whose was heaviest, held them before us to see whose bag looked fattest.  Our parents managed to sneak their share of their favorite candies out of our bags “for testing purposes only.”  They picked through our piles, tossing those items with open wrappers and anything else that looked suspicious while we stared at our treasures, our tummies growling in anticipation. 

Surprisingly enough, my family’s love and participation in the Halloween celebration did not fade as we grew older it just took on different forms.  One year, my parents set up a haunted house in our living room using old bed sheets to mark walls and passageways.  My mother, with her rather macabre sense of humor, created a Mad Surgeon’s Carving Room.  She placed sausage on one plate and told the blindfolded teenagers in the neighborhood that it was intestines.  She used pasta for worms and hard boiled eggs for eyeballs.  We had a wide bucket by the front door and as the younger children bobbed for apples my older sister’s hot pink record player blasted “Monster Mash” throughout the house. 

Ours was always the best haunted house in the neighborhood because its authenticity was backed by numerous deliciously macabre rumors.  But this house didn’t need urban legends, it had footsteps. Every child who was ever forced to sleep in one of those damp and drafty downstairs bedrooms heard those mysterious footsteps.  If they didn’t, there was always the rocking chair that rocked when no one was in the room, windows that slowly slid open then slammed shut, and objects that disappeared and reappeared in strange places, but most of the time it was the sound of footsteps stomping across the upper floors when no one else was home. One would think that these experiences would increase during the Halloween season, but they only added to the excitement, along with the plethora of scary movies shown on the local networks. This was the house that introduced me to the thrill of the harvest season, to that mysterious and magical place where all of my senses could experience the tantalizing pleasures of fall. 

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