Happy Halloween by Cynthia Pelayo

Halloween. Candy. These two things bring us together once a year, and you don’t have to be a child to enjoy either. You don’t even have to have children to enjoy this holiday. I’ve always loved Halloween because it’s always felt like a day we can all celebrate and enjoy. We can laugh together, watch scary movies together, and walk around our communities greeting neighbors while picking up some treats along the way.

I have two children, and we certainly enjoy Halloween each year. For Halloween, we aim to get as silly as we can. My eight-year-old makes sure of that. We’re that family who coordinates Halloween costumes, and my son was recently put in charge of what we would be this year. He decided on characters from Adventure Time, the more colorful and bold the better. I will be Princess Bubblegum this year. I can’t argue with an eight-year-old about that.

We’ll order pizza and I will bake cookies and we will decorate them with chocolate frosting and green, orange, black and white sprinkles. We will carve pumpkins, and for my parents who are too elderly to carve one, we will prepare one for them and take it over and leave it on their porch. I remember my first pumpkin ever. This cute, small orange thing. I must have been about four or five, and we arrived at our neighborhood market. In the produce aisle there was a bin of pumpkins and my father grabbed one small enough that I could hold it in my hands. He told me it was for Halloween and that this is what we do. I remember to this day what it felt like holding that pumpkin and bringing it home, later carving it and setting it out on our front porch. 

With the pandemic it’s rightly so that people are being extra cautious. Like last year, I will organize the Halloween treats into Ziploc bags so that the children don’t feel nervous about germs while digging through our Halloween bowl. In their Ziploc bags they will find miniature Snickers, Twix, M&Ms, Skittles, and Starbursts. They will also find a Halloween themed pencil and Halloween themed notepads.

I will set up a table on our porch and lay out the treat bags. We will then turn on a projector which will beam a haunted house image on our window. I will set up some creepy music to play on my laptop and we will sit and wait for our trick o’ treaters. We do this every year as a family, we sit outside and pass out candy and greet children and parents and grandparents and neighbors. We will laugh over costumes and ask each other how we are doing and talk about that new construction nearby slowing down traffic, or how the days are getting shorter and the nights are getting colder. We will smile and look forward to when we will see each other again. We don’t see each other too often as is, busy with children and work and navigating a new world with a pandemic still hanging over us, but for a few moments we will find cheer together in this day celebrating both life and death, and being thankful that we are still here. 

Cynthia “Cina” Pelayo is a two-time Bram Stoker Awards® nominated poet and author. She is the author of LOTERIA, SANTA MUERTE, THE MISSING, and POEMS OF MY NIGHT, all of which have been nominated for International Latino Book Awards. POEMS OF MY NIGHT was also nominated for an Elgin Award. Her recent collection of poetry, INTO THE FOREST AND ALL THE WAY THROUGH explores true crime, that of the epidemic of missing and murdered women in the United States, and was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award and Elgin Award. Her modern day horror retelling of the Pied Piper fairy tale, CHILDREN OF CHICAGO was released by Agora / Polis Books in 2021.

She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism from Columbia College, a Master of Science in Marketing from Roosevelt University, a Master of Fine Arts in Writing from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and is a Doctoral Candidate in Business Psychology at The Chicago School of Professional Psychology.

Cina was raised in inner city Chicago, where she lives with her husband and children.

Find her online at www.cinapelayo.com and on Twitter @cinapelayo.