It’s Halloween…cue Christmas Carols!
So despite the title of the post, I really don’t enjoy the fact that Christmas marketing becomes pervasive as soon as a pesky little holiday known as Halloween gets out of the way. I stopped in at Walgreens on my walk to lab this morning to pick up yet another bag of cough drops, and the Christmas tags and bags were already muscling their way into the emptying aisle of Halloween candy.
Halloween is not my favorite holiday, it never has been. As a kid, I was painfully shy and hated knocking on the neighbor’s doors and uttering the obligatory “trick-or-treat”. I usually let my sister do most of the work. The best houses were the ones with a bucket of candy on the porch; no talking to strangers required, but usually the bucket was long empty anyways. Then there was the neighbor who had a Great Dane that would hover at least a foot over me at the door and the fact that we lived in a small neighborhood where everyone had more than an acre of land. My school friend’s pillowcases of fun size bars made my little orange pumpkin of candy look pretty pathetic.
Despite all that, trick-or-treating was an awesome perk and something I looked forward to every year. My mom made some pretty sweet costumes and filled us up with a Halloween themed dinner so we didn’t gorge on candy all night. I especially remember the elephant costume: grey sweatsuit, a cozy grey hood she sewed with giant floppy ears, and a trunk on an elastic band that smelled so much like plastic I only put it over my nose as we rang the doorbells. The best part was that my sister was allergic to chocolate. After my dad had towed us back home in the radio flyer hooked up to the riding lawn mower, and we had dumped out our hauls on the family room floor, the trading commenced. I’ll take your snickers and hershey’s, here are my starbursts and chalky bottlecaps!
Now that I’m too old to go trolling for candy, Halloween is rather a sad holiday. But leave it to King Arthur Flour to lift my spirits by distracting me away from my lack of fun size bars and diverting my attention to more serious matters… The holiday preview catalogue showed up yesterday, which means it is officially time to start planning my holiday baking! The actual baking won’t begin until just after Thanksgiving when I make Springerle so they have time to age properly before breaking into the cookies on Christmas eve; but now that Halloween is here, I can unashamedly start amassing my list of cookie recipes.
On that note, if I’m going to see you for the holidays or I typically send you a box of cookies, feel free to leave a comment below if you have favorites that I’ve made in the past that you’d like to see on my cookie tray again this year. Oh, and Happy Halloween!
