Sarah Nigbor

My favorite time of year is beginning: When the heat of summer gives way to the coolness of autumn and a trio of festive holidays takes center stage, one for each month. Halloween in October, Thanksgiving (and deer hunting) in November and Christmas in December. Heck, I’ll even throw New Year’s in there too.

I love the outdoors, but my favorite place to be is tucked under a cozy blanket with candles dotting the room, a fire on the hearth, my dog cuddled next to me and a good murder mystery in my hands. A real book, not a Kindle. I refuse to read anything on a Kindle. I want to feel the weight of the book in my hands and actually turn the pages.

Growing up, my mother always made Halloween a festive affair. We decorated our house to the hilt, with green witches, orange pumpkins and wispy spider webs. I still like to carve pumpkins, except I don’t like the feel of slimy pumpkin guts on my hands. We don’t do elaborate designs, usually drawing them ourselves. My youngest son Lincoln is not artistic in the slightest, but his creation one year was especially lackluster, even for him. He carved a giant circle in the pumpkin. No eyes, no mouth, nothing. A big circle that he called “The Abyss.” I couldn’t tell if it was simplistic genius or laziness.

I went trick-or-treating until about the eighth grade, when a woman in River Falls shamed me. She refused to give me any candy because she said I was too old. A sensitive soul (sometimes too much), I was so embarrassed that I went immediately home. The way I look at it, would you rather have kids of all ages out trick-or-treating or boozing it up at a party somewhere?

One of my favorite places to go trick-or-treating growing up was the River Hills neighborhood in River Falls. It seemed like they always handed out good candy, meaning more candy bars and less taffy and suckers. As we were walking up a sidewalk at one house, a coffin in the yard creaked open and a man leapt out dressed as a corpse. I screamed bloody murder and hightailed it up the sidewalk as fast as my Fred Flintstone costume would let me. The corpse turned into a very concerned man, repeatedly apologizing for scaring me out of my wits. I’m a forgiving lass, and all it took was one Butterfinger for us to be friends.

It seems I’m particularly accident prone on Halloween, so perhaps a costume made of bubble wrap would be smart. When my daughter was 3, I was racing down the stairs of our raised ranch house to get to the ringing doorbell, candy bowl in hand. My socks slipped on the stairs, my feet went out from under me and I flew in the air. Upon landing on my tailbone, I slid the rest of the way down to the front door like I was on a playground slide, landing like a sack of potatoes in a heap. Carolina promptly opened the door before I could get off the floor to a bunch of trick-or-treaters and proudly announced, “Hi! My mommy fell down the stairs. Would you like some candy?”

Another year I was traipsing down a pitch-black street, trying to keep up with the kids when my face met the asphalt. I had unknowingly found my way into a large pothole and hit the ground face first. My knees or hands didn’t even break the fall. My glasses promptly smashed, I received a nice black eye and a leg the color of midnight. Blood was running down my face as people swarmed around me trying to help. At that point, the adrenaline was high and all that hurt was my pride. I was a hurting unit the next day though.

And wouldn’t you know it, even though we went trick-or-treating in the daylight the next year, I bit the dust again. I tripped on a sidewalk crack disguised by mounds of crunchy leaves, this time landing on my hands and knees on the concrete. Luckily, no one saw it and I popped up like a jack-in-the-box, hoping to keep my pride intact. It wasn’t to be. The kids saw my misfortune and immediately began howling with laughter. That was my last foray into trick-or-treating. A book on the couch sounds like the safer option to me.