News

Last year, I cleared out the purple cobwebs. I also ditched the spiders that moaned when they swayed in the wind. I trashed the gauzy white sheets that became ghosts every year. I broke up the Styrofoam gravestones. I even got rid of the hair band with the little battery-powered lit-up skulls that bobbled from springy coils.

It was an enormous and liberating relief. I am an almost-empty-nester, and the loss of that box of scary decorations is cause for celebration.

I detest Halloween. It's a festival of frighteningly bad taste.

I don't like pumpkins and their goopy interiors. I'm not fond of cheap candy. And I hate having to dress up my house like a tart in tacky clothes hoping to get attention from passing pedestrians.

But for many years, that one night in October was my annual performance review as a parent.

It didn't help that we lived in Rosedale, a la-di-da neighbourhood of Toronto where people compete about everything, from what car they drive to where their children go to school to how well clipped their hedges are.

There was a house around the corner that was done up like a Hollywood set every Halloween, complete with an open coffin on the front lawn in which Mr. Rosedale lay still as a corpse, his face painted ghostly white, for hours.

To keep up with the McMoneys, our house had to be scary, too. I had to be a big, bad witch with a green nose and yellow skin in a big black hat, doling out candies in a darkened foyer lit only by blood-dripping candles. Every time the doorbell rang, I had to push the button on a cassette tape player so the eerie moaning would frighten the trick-or-treaters.

If I didn't, well, the goblins would get me. My three boy goblins, then between the ages of about 10 and 6.

"Mom, you're not doing it right," the eldest would huff as he made his way home with his dad to drop some of his loot before heading out again. "You're not supposed to talk like a mom. Put on your scary voice And the light was on."

He was a Dracula with his hands on his hips.

I had disappointed them.

It was just like the time one of my boys begged me to be a class mom, a volunteer co-ordinator of parental involvement for the teacher. "Every one else's mom has been one," he said, clasping my face between his two little hands. I couldn't bear the dejected look in his eyes. I wasn't even a full-blown working mom, like the other Have-It-Allers at the school. So, I did do the classroom duty that year, out of guilt.

Don't get me wrong. I love being a mother. I even think it's neat that we're all called the same thing, so that when a child calls out "Mom" in a playground, we all instinctively jerk our heads in that direction. It's like being part of an invisible, anonymous tribe, which is a lovely relief from being yourself.

But I am not one of those mothers who shows up at the school on Valentine's Day wearing head-to-toe red, or on Halloween wearing orange and black, or at Christmas in one of those "holiday sweaters" with snowmen or reindeer on the front. That's a bit too keen for me. I prefer a little irony with my chocolate chip cookies - which I baked, by the way, although not regularly.

Originally a pagan festival, later embraced by the Pope as part of All Saints' Day, Halloween has become the one big community event that people of all religions and ethnic backgrounds feel they can participate in. Maybe that's why it's so popular. You don't have to be politically correct and say, "Happy holiday." You can celebrate without caution.

But there's something about my own child-centric generation of parents that I find annoying. We not only do everything for them, we try to be them.

Not me, though. Not this year. My children are all grown up. The last one at home, my 17-year-old, would rather watch hockey than answer the door. During the trick-or-treating hours, the lights in my house will be turned off, and I will be drinking a glass of pinot noir at my local hangout, reading the latest issue of The New Yorker.

It's scary, I know, but I'm turning into a bad-tempered witch.