My wife loves Halloween. She adores it. She has an actress inside of her and loves playing a new character each year. She starts talking to us in October about the next year’s costumes. This gets debated off and on until something feels right or time picks the costumes for us. She likes us to dress up in themes and over the years we have been ladybugs, the Incredibles, Doctor Who, Star Wars, and this past Halloween, Dia de los Muertos skeletons. From as early as June through Halloween she squirrels away bits and pieces of costumes until a large push at the end gets it done. I like Halloween, but being busy with work I find it hard to muster the time she needs for me to help her. Our children love Halloween too but they hate doing the work to get ready for it and sometimes resist going as a theme because, well, they are teenagers. Each year my wife works really hard to make each of us a wonderful costume while getting variable amounts of help in return. Often there is grumbling about the effort when we want to do something else. Unfortunately, I occasionally add to the discontent.

This past year was a little different because of the lockdowns. We weren’t sure how much Halloween would happen so my wife delayed costume preparation until it started to look like there would be some Halloween after all. Our costumes consisted of gaiters to cover our mouths that had Dia de los Muertos skeletons printed on them. She added some pretty impressive face paint and dark, formal clothes to finish it out. The attached photo is my daughter in her costume. To her credit, my daughter put a lot of effort into her costume while my wife did most of the work for the rest of us.

This is my daughter in her costume this year. She did the face makeup herself. The car also had a fog machine under it that we turned on once it got dark.  My wife also made the wood surrounding the fake fire.  She’s pretty awesome.

To celebrate Halloween this year, our church did a drive-by trick-or-treat for the kids. The teenagers in the congregation and those of us who work with them decorated our cars to be trick-or-treat outposts. Families would drive by and we would pass out candy to their children. It was a lot of fun. The kids really liked my costume and loved to tell me about theirs (that’s my favorite part of Halloween). As I was interacting with a really cute and precocious five-year-old princess I realized that I was only there and able to enjoy myself so much because of my wife’s hard work and cleverness. I was so grateful that she had done so much to make Halloween a fun day. I would be really lazy about celebrations without a wife who works so hard to make them special. I’m so grateful to have her.

Day 6