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Trick or Treat – The Real Sweetness of Halloween

Claudia | October 25, 2011 | Comments (4)

Halloween has always been one of my favorite holidays…long before it became outré cool to go all out decorating with inflated ghosts and floating goblins. Maybe my love for this eerie holiday has something to do with being the daughter of a dentist. Halloween was the one day where we could actually go out begging for candy…something that was rarely found in our house…and then gobble it down like there was no tomorrow.

As a kid, I would spend weeks planning what I would be for Halloween. For me, the challenge was going into the attic and finding all of the supplies that I would need to create my own costume. The attic was a magical place…crowded, musty and filled with treasure. Old lumberjack shirts, big old work pants with suspenders, hats that I couldn’t imagine anyone would wear seriously as a style statement and shoes that laced up with something akin to severity. Pieces of age worn satin tucked into shelves that begged to be discovered. A trunk filled with baby clothes that once swaddled my scampering little self, smelled vaguely of our old apartment and comfort. With all of these treasures just screaming to be part of a creative expression, Halloween took on far more joy for me than I am sure was ever originally intended.

When it was my children’s turn to engage in the fantasy that is Halloween, right from the start I encouraged costumes made more from their imagination than from a big box store’s suggestions. And so it was. And while I didn’t have an attic filled with mysteries from the past, I did have a closet filled with enough weird grown up clothes to suit their fancy. My favorite costume of all time was my son’s endeavor to create the illusion of a headless man carrying his own head…pure genius.

And because, once smitten with Halloween, always smitten, I would dress up in a colorful clown’s wig, paint my face in a rainbow of colors and don overalls and a boldly striped shirt with matching striped socks and join my children in the pursuit of treats. A sort of ET-esque ambiance infused our neighborhood as children and parents wandered through the streets shrieking their hellos and shaking bags filled with candy to show off who was getting the most treats.

And now…my children are grown. And home…it is out in the country where it is not conducive to children ringing the doorbell squealing “trick or treat” with glee. I get nostalgic for the feel of little hands warmed by mine as we plot our path through the neighborhood…the feel of a job well done when, home at last, the bags were dumped onto the middle of the floor and sorted…the secret smile I wore knowing that two days after Halloween, when the kids had already lost interest in the remaining goodies and I could quietly “donate” them to local businesses.

Because, the real sweetness of Halloween has always been in the memories it has created.

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About Claudia: Claudia Anderson is always reinventing her life. A Chicago native, Claudia received her BSN at Loyola University and worked as a registered nurse for ten years. When her children were just 2 and 4 years old, Claudia decided to follow in her father’s footsteps and become a dentist. She graduated from the University of Illinois Chicago College of Dentistry where she received her DDS. She worked as a dentist in her practice Family Dental Care Park Ridge until 2010 when she did a little more reinventing and took on two amazing young dentists to care for the practice’s wonderful patients. Claudia then immersed herself in understanding marketing and practice growth and embraced social media and all of it’s potential. Claudia can be found blogging for her practice, Family Dental Care Park Ridge, as well as on her site to encourage the dental industry to understand social media at Social Media DDS. View author profile.