From the editor
Publisher’s
Journal
Amy Mendenhall
Amy Mendenhall is the publisher and editor-in-chief of Parent Magazine. |
I love fall. Something about the crisp air and the crunchy leaves always gets me excited. As I’m writing this in early September, it is 90 degrees out, and I’m looking forward to getting out my long-sleeved shirts and wearing boots instead of sandals with my skirts to work. But the best part of fall has to be Halloween.
Every year, as soon as school starts, my daughters and I start the early hunt for Halloween costumes. I like to get them as soon as they are first out on display so they’ll be able to take their pick and not just settle for whatever is left over. My husband and I also like to dress up when we take them trick-or-treating, but our costumes tend to be more what we can make out of the stuff we have and end up either being obscure movie characters, like Leon and Matilda from “The Professional,” or abstract ideas, like punk rock vampires. This year the big debate is either Riff-Raff and Magenta from “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” or superheroes from an upcoming novel.
My daughters begin bugging me about getting out the Halloween decorations as soon as they start popping up in stores, which as you can guess is early September. My husband refuses to celebrate for months at a time, so the earliest we get is Oct. 1. And every year after the holiday, we hit the sales to try to get more decorations. There are two major holidays that we decorate for around my house. The biggest one is, of course, Christmas. The other is Halloween. We have a lot of the pumpkin motif, as that’s what my daughters like, and werewolves and vampires, which is what I and my husband like. While buying my oldest daughter’s witch costume (she wanted to be Hermoine
from Harry Potter and I convinced her it was basically the same thing), I happened across a “make your own graveyard kit,” which is something I add to every year for Halloween since our bushes in front of our house died, leaving us with a big blank spot right in front of our window. Maybe when it goes on sale...
And, of course, there is the Halloween candy to buy. When I was little, my neighborhood didn’t celebrate Halloween. We lived on a deadend street in the middle of nowhere, and I was pretty much the only kid around. Since no one ever came out that far to trick-or-treat, none of our neighbors bothered. This meant my parents ended up driving around town, taking me to their friends’ and grandparents’ friends’ houses to trick-or-treat. As I got a bit older, I usually went with a friend who happened to live in one of my grandparents’ neighborhoods. I still take my kids on that same route we used to travel. When I was no longer able to go trick-or-treating, I’d go to my grandparents’
house to pass out treats, something I never got to do at my own house.
That’s why I was so excited the first year my husband and I moved into our house to buy Halloween candy. Trick-or-treaters would show up! I made elaborate treat bags with all sorts of candy. My husband took his nephew around the block for the first hour, while I praised every kid who came to my door - An alien? Awesome! Superman? Even better! - and our friends came over later to help pass out treats and watch scary movies. It was a major event!
When we had kids of our own, priorities shifted. I still buy lots of candy, though there’s not enough time anymore to make elaborate bags. My mother comes down to man the door while we’re out with the kids, and I take over when I get back. My Halloween music CD plays in the background (that is if I can get it back from the girls, who insist on listening to it in January or June, whenever the urge to hear “Monster Mash” or “Bad Moon Rising” hits) and our carved jack o’ lanterns flicker multiple colors merrily with their battery operated lights inside (75 cents on sale last September!)
And when Halloween is over? Well, It’s only four more weeks until it’s time to get out the Christmas decorations!
