I believe I was fourteen years old the first time I tried to calculate the halfway point to Halloween.
Fourteen was the year I started to jtruly accept my eternal longing for Halloween as a part of me; a bigger part than I ever allowed myself to acknowledge in such a way before.
I can't remember exactly how I did it. I just remember this little purse-sized calendar I'd gotten from a local Hallmark store, full of spooky doodles and quotes and sayings despite the fact that it had a pastel flower on the front and a list of traditional wedding anniversary gifts on the final pages. (I pondered these often. Paper? Clocks? Did anyone abide by this?) That calendar was like me. Outwardly very girly, very much what you'd expect from a basic female of my age, but the inside was full of everything I was afraid to express.
On the first page, like a warning, I'd written I like black cats and bats. Somewhere in the middle, a pair of eyes drawn over the calendar boxes of whichever month it was, with the words I SCARE YOU written darkly, deliberately, in classic artistic-little-girl calligraphy, between them. On the month of October was a poem I tried to write after stumbling into a clearance Halloween section in a local store that was closing, desperately trying to describe what Halloween felt like, what it meant to me. And on November's pages, very simply written, was something along the lines of If I could erase you, I would...
Every page was full of words and drawings, usually of pumpkins of the aforementioned black cats and bats, etc., but the one thing every box on that little calendar had in common, were the tiny dots from me constantly counting down the days until Halloween.
It must have been a particularly agonizing winter's day when I decided, if Halloween were still so far away, why not try to calculate a halfway point, so it didn't seem so hopeless?
Again, I'm not sure how I did it, just counted off six months from and six months until Halloween I suppose, literally the one time I ever decided to do math voluntarily, and came to the conclusion that the halfway point to Halloween would fall on April 31st...if such a day existed. I wasn't sure which day, at that point, to crown the official halfway point to Halloween, so I wrote on both months, April and May, with a little asterisk for effect, *halfway point between April 30th and May 1st. I never bothered to say the halfway point to what. I knew. And, not that anyone else really looked in that little calendar booklet, but I'm sure if someone did, they would know too.
That was about twenty-one years ago. And from that day on, I always made at least some sort of effort to celebrate the halfway point to Halloween. I don't remember exactly how I did it when I was younger...I suppose I just watched Hocus Pocus and delighted in telling everyone around me what day it was, and how close we were getting to October 31st. When I got older, whatever year it was that iCarly was popular and did an episode called iHalfoween, I researched the term "Halfoween" and found that most people deemed it to fall on May 1st. At the time it was generally used by bars and pubs and those sorts of places, and excuse to get people in to party. That, obviously, is not my scene, but I found ways to celebrate on my own. Movie marathons, fashioning everyday clothes into sort of "half-costumes", carving craft pumpkins, visiting cemeteries, taking and sharing pictures. It was always the biggest day on the countdown to Halloween.
As the years have gone on, Halfoween has finally caught on, and become a time for celebration among the entire Halloween community. Spooky artists are having sales. Haunts are opening for a few nights. Even big box stores like Home Depot are offering deals on Halloween decor!
When I think back to my fourteen-year-old self, sitting on the yellowish carpet of her childhood bedroom, dreaming of a spookier world and doodling the things she didn't dare share with anyone else for fear of judgement inside the very thing that made her feel so restrained, all I can think now is, we did it. We created our own world, outside of the confines of a calendar, tossing aside the belief that anything should be "seasonal" if it makes us happy. And now there is a whole community, counting down to Halloween with us, every day of the year.
Stay spooky, my friends.
We're over the hump!
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