Every October, my family does the same things, from apple picking and hayrides to going to haunted houses and taking ghost tours. From September 29th to November 30, life is literally filled with some sort of event. For some reason we cram as much in as possible almost like our version of letting in The New Year, two months before the fact...
For over 70 years, my family held a tradition on Halloween -- the culmination of the month of October -- where we attended a parade put on by the local Shriners. The parade ran right by my aunt's house and would be a day-long event from 11 am to nearly 9 pm, but my cousins and I loved every minute of it because it would be a chance to just hang out with each other which wasn't possible during the school year except for school vacations.
It would be just as important to the rest of my family because my aunt's house was a gathering place for them, a chance to sit around the kitchen table and just catch up even if we'd just seen eachother the previous weekend. It would be like those old TV shows, with women in the kitchen and men in the living room. I would go back and forth watching my aunts and mother talk to each other and my father and uncles screaming at the Patriots on the old TV.
My aunts made this a grand affair with tons of food. One of my aunts would literally spend days cooking like it was The Last Supper and the place would be jammed with neighbors, friends and whomever. For one day this was the place to be and the fact that it was Halloween made it even better...
The parade itself was nearly two hours long, with floats created by kids and adults. Some floats were manned by people tossing candy while others would throw out magnets and of course the high school bands would play and dance troupes would also perform. There were people dressed up as Scooby Doo and one year there was even a tribute to the Beatles and of course there was always a frightening clown who would send me running into my aunt's lap.
The parade was usually on the coldest day of October, so we'd bundle up and go back and forth to my aunt's house to get warm. But the moment we'd get warm we'd head back outside and freeze again. A normal person would have said "screw it" and stayed in the house but nope, we insisted on watching the parade from the sidewalk.
When my cousins and I were little and very into trick or treating, we would pick a theme each year for our costumes: one year we went as aliens, another as Star Wars characters (except my Princess Leia looked nothing like Carrie Fisher, more like what Carrie Fisher looked like last year with the buns on her ears, plus i wore my glasses). Another year we dressed up as Minnie Mouse, Roger Rabbit and the Devil. It was the same thing every year: we'd change into our costumes, parade through my aunts house like we were runway models and make adjustments to the custumes before hitting the streets for candy.
After getting our candy and freezing our behinds off, we'd go back to my aunt's house and watch Hocus Pocus, after which we always felt like that day after Christmas -- the excitement was over.
Our aunts made sure that we were safe but having fun. They also instilled in us the need to cherish the traditions of our family, to know where we came from and what we were supposed to bring to the party in terms of behavior and culpability. As we grew older, we were expected to carry on the tradition of having the party after the parade and bring the past into our future, to make sure any children we would have would know what it was like to carry on specific family traditions.
But like so many things, the party came to an end and the house was torn down, so the tradition was discontinued and with it, that sense of home and feeling of family... it was like the house was the one thing that kept us together and by tearing down the house and breaking the tradition, being a family was over
It's time for us to make our own traditions
Tell me, what traditions did you have growing up?