Boo Who

by: Daina Makinson

OK – you heard it first here. I am a bona fide, card carrying, registered Halloween Fan.  Halloween became my Mecca when we moved into our house in Oakville, but my Dad warned me I should only expect about 20 kids. What travesty was this!!?  This became my raison d’etre. I wanted to become the Halloween destination of choice in my neighbourhood.

My pilgrimage to Costco would begin early in October.  I wasn’t going to become the Queen O’Ween by dolling out sample size candy.  So I loaded up the truck with full size everything. In my rookie year I discovered Sour Skittles were like the Pied Piper of Candy. If you want to build a clientele it’s about supply and demand and I would be the only house on the street with an unlimited supply of the full size candy for sourness addicts.

I created a Halloween experience fit for any budding Vincent Price. My Great Pumpkin, always carved grudgingly by Wayne, would sneer down on the line up of multiple Jack Sparrows and Darth Vaders. The long walkway edged by endless teeny pumpkins, carved again by Wayne (now you know why grudgingly!) would light up all the little ladybugs as they tottered to our porch. We would peek through the window to watch their reaction to the slow creaking door and heavy-laden footsteps that would greet them if they dared to ring our ghoulish doorbell that I would answer donned as Professor Dumbledore – the Wizard of all Wizards.

Each and every year my “sales” increased.  It was all about referrals and we had built a following to well over a hundred when the unthinkable happened.  We moved to Puslinch.

Now you know I love Puslinch.  But I wasn’t prepared for my first Halloween here – three kids and one anonymous dicey adult neighbour. Ok, I said to Wayne.  I can work with this. It’s just going to be more of a challenge. I added full cans of pop to the menu. It worked!  The second year I doubled my traffic and got six kids and a different anonymous dicey neighbour. The neighbour thing was some sort of annual gag that I felt strangely proud to be included in it.

Anyway at this rate if I kept doubling my customers by 2013 I would be just under the100 mark! Blissful haunted heaven to me.  Unfortunately I couldn’t have foreseen the Creepy Crash of 2010.  No one rang the ghastly doorbell.  Not even our anonymous dicey neighbour.  It was like I had been stood up.  The Grinch had stolen my Christmas.

Stay tuned. But this year I am steeling myself for the eventual disappointment. I will courageously do my best, but I know that when I drift off into my dorky Halloween dreamland that night, I will remember a marvelous moment, many eons ago, when a little girl ran down our driveway shouting with joy that “DAD! THIS IS THE BEST HOUSE EVER!”.  

Posted in: Family, Home, Personal Stories