Masks and Glitter and Id, Oh my! - We Done Halloweened

NOVEMBER!

Another month, another Calendar page turned.

A new month all immersed in the Wright-status-quo instead of the upheaval of September and the settling dust of October.

Just in time for "the holidaze" that's lurking to settle in some time mid-November. Whooo.

Having thanked our Halloween decor and put it in its packaging (or the trash considering how much of it was very destoyable construction paper), the walls are Chaya's to decorate. And it's getting creative.

I guess November is the month we celebrate "butterflies" (girls wearing wings) and bunnies and random pictures of daddy in bad Stitch Fix outfits drawn over in a paint program by the artist herself.

Oh and we have skullz on the wall because Chaya was sad when the movie Coco ended yesterday and this was my rabbit in a hat suggestion that cheered her up. So... Thanksgiving decorations!?! Instead of Pilgrims, maybe Luchadores?

Mommy is expanding her artistic repertoire like crazy here.

Mostly just with cutting out increasingly complex shapes at Chaya's direction. We're ready for whatever holiday is coming our way, though that's for sure. We've got that much construction paper and a whole paint program on daddys computer. Chaya's nominated Easter. She's big into Easter...

But first, Halloween finally happened!

Chaya was in HEAVEN. Like her mommy, Halloween hits her just right. We've been anticipating it for roughly seven months. She wore her monarch costume for a straight week, not taking it off for any reason. Occasionally breaking into song and dance and FLAP FLAP FLAP arms. The day before Halloween, she had a Halloween event at her pre-school, and came home bedecked in homemade bijoux of a paper pumpkin motif. She immediately lost her favorite necklace. But she also got a book out of the day so we got to go home and REEEEEEAD, which is best thing ever after drawing (and watching "songs" of course).

And then HALLOWEEN. Which was different because Mommy was also a butterfly. Copy much, mommy? But Chaya is of the age, where she actively wants to match her mommy, so it gave her a kick, except when I wouldn't give her all of the ribbons I'd put in my hair. Sharing? FFS, mom! Are you in preschool? I don't think so. Give that shiznet all over!


I volunteered at her preschool, so I can tell you the inside scoop on the "Halloween carnival games!" The children were shuffled down to "play games" in small classroom groups, all well managed by several employees with walkie talkies and a variety of mom volunteers who stood at their stations awaiting the rush of happy kids.

It still submerged in a chaos of shuffling children from game to game. Some kids repeating games hundreds of times and other kids never reaching them all.

There were five or six stations of regular kinda harvest festivalley games. Mostly tossing various things into various other things of different shape and height. "Prizes" were equally distributed at the end of class time.

Damn some of these kids can THROW! I was at an inflatable creature with a big net in its face, and some of these kids knocked it right on its tush with perfect aim that held a shock of bloodlust.

Chaya, not so much. She has a very elegant butterfly way of placing the beanbags in the net before dissolving into giddy giggles. But she likes golf (hockey golf?), so we're still on track for those sports scholarships, phew!


After another massive binge of paper pumpkins and - thank god - a new yarn and bead necklace, Chaya had a brief holiday break and then back into the breeches.

Trick or Treating!

Chaya was on it. Running in random trajectories screaming TRICK OR TREAT at artbitrary moments in the middle of FLAP FLAP FLAP-ing.

Kent Station was a really nice location of shops that held children well and their entourages well.

Chaya got to visit tons of places in quick succession and see tons and tons of other costumes all before dinner time.

She even got to mount a fire truck just for kicks.

Of course she brought home a modest collection of candy all chosen by the appeal of the packaging itself, having little historic exposure to the various candies by which to recall the taste and texture.


We had a grand taste test that more or less finished all the candy that was fit to eat.

Sugar Daddies are "glue" and laffy taffys are so incredibly vile that Chaya had to wipe her mouth out with a napkin after sampling a banana one. Chocolate is good. Apparently for sharing. Andrew and I ate a ton. And with that, the candy was gone.



Chaya didn't want Halloween to be over, but some coaxing and a bath time even convinced her to change her dress

Still, don't blame her. It's one of those holidays I could stretch out a lot longer..





...Because it matters to me.

A story that's been kicking around Facebook. 
About David Bowie of course:

‘I was withdrawn, more withdrawn than the other kids. We all got a signed poster. Because I was so shy, they put me in a separate room, to one side, and so I got to meet him alone. He’d heard I was shy and it was his idea. He spent thirty minutes with me.

‘He gave me this mask. This one. Look.

‘He said: ‘This is an invisible mask, you see?

‘He took it off his own face and looked around like he was scared and uncomfortable all of a sudden. He passed me his invisible mask. ‘Put it on,’ he told me. ‘It’s magic.’

‘And so I did.

‘Then he told me, ‘I always feel afraid, just the same as you. But I wear this mask every single day. And it doesn’t take the fear away, but it makes it feel a bit better. I feel brave enough then to face the whole world and all the people. And now you will, too.

‘I sat there in his magic mask, looking through the eyes at David Bowie and it was true, I did feel better.

‘Then I watched as he made another magic mask. He spun it out of thin air, out of nothing at all. He finished it and smiled and then he put it on. And he looked so relieved and pleased. He smiled at me.

‘'Now we’ve both got invisible masks. We can both see through them perfectly well and no one would know we’re even wearing them,’ he said.

‘So, I felt incredibly comfortable. It was the first time I felt safe in my whole life.

‘It was magic. He was a wizard. He was a goblin king, grinning at me.

‘I still keep the mask, of course. This is it, now. Look.’

  When I was in my teens, my mom's boss remarked in a random aside to her that it was like she could see fairy dust hovering around me.

A lot of people have put such sentiments a lot of other ways since then, but it connects with this dazedly whimsical daydreaming glittery part of self that carries through from childhood to now.

A kind of vulnerable innocent bit of soul that flutters above the jaded worldly part of practical and realistic day-to-day adulthood. Both a pure essence and a small bit of muffling shield for the deepest most sensitive feelings parts of self. The innocence that my adult self cannot have.

 The lightheartedness that flutters above some very deep and profound understandings of the pain, the grief and suffering of life. Above the scared sketical part. And it takes all the heavy emotional energy of the world, holds it gently, then says "yes... AND SPARKLES!" Because sometimes these are needed.

  I've also been compared to "that chick from Fight Club" (thanks, guy I was so hopelessly infatuated with). That connected with the time - major depression, first smoldering heartbreak in the craters of said first depression, first discovery of various forms of self-expression and alternative paths.

I still paw at that little part of me that is so very much that tarnished childishness with sharp edges and a piercing dash of nihilism and thrown up existentially exhausted hands that again covers a layer over that most deeply felt self and deepest felt hope.

 There's generally a mordant, sharp-tongued, sensual, predatory side of me; her very favorite self-twin is the whimsical fanciful childlike side. One almost emerged from the other and they continue to build from each other.

They like to hold hands and spin together until they are both dizzy.

And they like to express themselves in turns and in tandem, shyly erupting onto the palate of adult life like a freshly stomped tube of paint.

Sometimes in word or deed. Often in adornment.

Costume. As if the ordinary day to day uniform is any less of one. When I am feeling most myself, I am indulging in some variety of dress-up. As if some part of me must seep out and take that drab serious world by its balls and say "no no I don't accept these terms."

And still. I dig Chaya's immersion into fancy - my biting soul-snatching little butterfly! (Not gonna tell you, kiddo, what mommy does with all your wings and crowns and wands when you're asleep...)


Naturally I pretty much was a dance and a theater kid -pockets of refuge! But even there it gets taken so seriously sometimes!

The thing is I'm not brimming over with eagerness to stick out (dance floor/performance and a good good flirtation is an exception). I've learned to accept attention because it comes from being who I am sometimes, but it isn't comfortable. It's more of a trade off that I make - slightly more uncomfortable and set apart, but who I am. And it goes on scales of course.

I'm not hardcore or handy enough for cosplay. My dress up has always been slapdash and skill-less.

Like when I was a kid with my giant box of fabrics and discard dresses. Things tied together, taped together, stapled together.

Worn for a transformation and then discarded.

I know I'm not alone here. The freaks and geeks besties of my highschool.

 My predominate crew of UMass grads and drop outs for whom there was a pretty "every day is Halloween" casual grasping for some element of childlike make-belief mixed into the grimmer realities of understood pain and loss and existential uncertainty.

And ballroom dancers - it's all costumes and glitter and make believe with a deeply mahogany bronzer adult edge.

Halloween, to me, is the festival of the misfit, the dreamy kid, the weirdo, the geeks and the freaks. When everyone else comes around to "our" (it's heterogenous that "our" but there's a universality) way of thinking. And we all do the Time Warp together! And we realize how many people felt they were in the "our" category to begin with.

As an adult, I'm still usually the only adult in the room in a costume. Because I don't really do the heavy drinking thing, which seems to be a requisite for people to get into it without  a kid attached to them. And - as above - I don't do the cosplay thing.

But I still love it. Not just as an excuse to be a bit more sartorially "myself"...

Halloween to me is the ultimate fete for the subconscious elements that dictate our lives so much more forcefully than the words we attempt to tame them with. Childhood and the macabre are a natural fit. It's the adult world that closes its eyes tightly to the darker elements and to the lighter ones for a middling reality in the middle.

Halloween and holidays like it acknowledge that in hiding ourselves we often reveal ourselves more deeply. They remind us that we are always playing parts and wearing masks and hiding bits here and there; and when our day to day is hidden, the other parts are revealed. The celebration of our fears, our fancies, our wildest urges that  push and prod us more forcefully the more we suppress them.

It holds the power of fantasy and deception. Fantasy, which takes our deepest fears and urges and makes them safe. Which changes our world so we can change ourselves. Which lets us order and process and reclaim our bodies and souls from the forces that strip autonomy and power from us. Deception, which is the root of artistry - presenting the deepest truths of the world in safely colored packages wrapped in candy flavoring to mediate the instinctive recoil. Friends meet behind masks, free of the scripts and preconceptions that both support and obscure their connections.

In this spirit, we run towards fear and desire instead of away. We embrace the role that death has in life and allow grief to pepper our merriment. As if the community comes together for just a short moment and acknowledges that this cycle of life and death and pain and need and want and loss ... is big and scary. And it also is what it is. And it is life and that makes it beautiful too. There's an element of compassion sewn into that.

...And everyone drinks too much and eats a ton of candy. That part resonates less, but I'll accept it because I'm not a hypervigilant angry vegan Pinterest mom who just wants her kids to exchange eco-friendly spooky poems that are culturally respectful and definitely gluten and sugar free with zero ecological impact. I'm close, but I don't have the anger. Festival spirit is festival spirit. Children running in packs screaming trick or treat and owning the world around them, as it bends to fit their own internal worlds a bit more closely.

And with that - and a soulful passing through All Soul's Day with a nod to Dia de Los Muertos in as minimally appropriative a way as possible - we're onto...

gulp...

the HOLIDAZE!!

How does one decorate for Thanksgiving in a way that isn't all whitewashing genocide and celebrating meat products I actually don't eat? Apparently skulls and "butterfly-girls". Thanks, Chaya, I knew you'd figure it out.