Alyne’s not the biggest Halloween fan. Actually, Alyne and shopping malls have something in common: they both begin promoting Christmas in October. Alyne believes that Halloween is just a stepping stone in the path to Christmas festivities. See, in Alyne’s mind (as far as I can tell, I don’t really know what goes on in her head, which is why I make half this stuff up), you endure Halloween, then you deal with Thanksgiving, which, according to Alyne, is kind of a non-event, unless there’s company in from out of town. Then there’s the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and then there’s Christmas Eve. Christmas Eve is awesome because Alyne eats guacamole and spinach dip, and parties with family, and gets to curl her hair and wear pantyhose. She also gets to open exactly one present, which had better be a damn Arch Card or she will command that the fiery pits of hell open up and swallow you whole.
But, back to Halloween.
Alyne does enjoy the Halloween party at her work, where they have a costume contest. She’s won the contest with the same black cat costume for three years straight, which is bizarre because for about 1,000 consecutive Halloweens she was the Evil Queen from Snow White and she never won anything with that costume, which is fairly elaborate. Conversely, the black cat costume is pretty much just a headband with ears and drawn-on whiskers and a fuzzy sweater, which shows that in real life, like in fairy tales, the simple and pure win at the end while the Evil Queen gets nothing.
Alyne doesn’t go trick-or treating anymore. She used to trick-or-treat around the cul-de-sac until about 5 years ago, and when we were younger there would be huge neighborhood block parties, but we finally got it through our thick skulls that she doesn’t even like candy, and so dragging a 30-year-old around the neighborhood for candy was just unnecessary; I mean, if we wanted candy we could just drive to the grocery store (or turn off the lights and blow out he jack-o-lantern and pretend that nobody was home during trick-or-treat hours as we sat in the dark feasting on the candy that we bought for the neighborhood kids).
Nowadays, Alyne helps hand out candy to the neighborhood kids, and by “helps” I mean that she stays in her room and watches “The Parent Trap” on her private television set and gets irate every time the dog barks at the doorbell. Then she pulls out her videos of “Home Alone”, “Elf”, and “A Christmas Story” and, poof, the Christmas season has begun!
