:: All Hallow’s Eve ::

The pumpkins and cats my mom taught me to make.  These are my versions, now ancient – cracked smiles, a lost foot here and there.  The same we have hung up for centuries.

Here is the way I see the world: it’s made up of interlocking, sometimes warring cultures.  But the cultures are made up – as are all things in our reality – of sub particles.  And the most essential of these is the family.  Inside the family, there grows a micro culture.  It borrows from the outside cultural influence, but it’s really constructed out of the personalities, fears, ignorance or education, faith, expecations, apprehensions, practices and processes and level of love of the heads of household.  Of course, that means that the extended family has a great influence on the budding micro-culture – the way each parent was brought up, the way their own parents saw the world and dealt with it.  But the new combination of two people from different micro-cultures will result in a unique spin on all the outside elements – sometimes carrying forward old traditions and rules and ways of seeing with joy – and sometimes growing in spite of the old things in a new way.

The family is the basic unit of any larger culture.  Lose the family, and you lose the richness and health and certainly the meaning of any cultural tradition.

So maybe I’m writing about family traditions.

See?  It’s already long.  Maybe I’ll make this part one and pepper it with unassociated pictures, just to keep everybody awake.

I’m still trying to figure out how to get where I mean to go with this –

Shoot on a gloomy day, inside – high ISO, really low shutter speed.  But you’ll get the idea.  This is a pumpkin my sister made for me some years ago, stuffed with surprises.

I grew up in a kind little family.  We moved all over the place because of Dad’s work, huge moves, across-half-the-continent kinds of moves almost every time.  I was the New Kid in 6^th grade, in 8^th grade and my senior year.  Sadly timed, these moves, but useful, I guess, in building parts of my understanding.  And our extended family was tiny: my only blood uncle is on my mom’s side and they moved around easily as much as we did, only once ending up on the same coast (several states apart) at the same time.  My only aunt is my dad’s sister and my Godmother – but we were only lucky enough to live close to her for maybe a year and a half, out in Missouri.

So our family had to become its own little unit.  And our traditions were the thing that kept our home real as it moved from house to house.  I don’t think my parents were as in love with the traditions as I was; they tried changing them a couple of times, but the changes didn’t take.  We needed those rocks in our stream.  And I am a great rock defender.

But it’s Halloween I really want to talk about.  If you don’t know its origins, all you have to do is Google for it.  The fete as we know it has its roots in a gaggle of traditions: the Catholic celebration of All Saints’ Day is November 1^st (thus: All Hallows Eve), and in Samhain, the celtic feast – the night when the Queen of the Fairies seals her mortality agreement with the dark powers (according to some), but also simply the time when autumn and winter begin to mix like fresh water and salt and the nights grow more dense and cold and the days shorter.  The end of harvest.  The looming of the frightening lean, freezing times – to be survived for another year.

Junk on the table.

The practice of trick-or-treating may have its beginnings in the simple ancient practice of leaving out a bowl of milk on the porch to placate the mischievous and threatening, immortal dark folk who could make your life miserable if they took the whim.  And the costumes came of a feeling that (especially seeing as  the night before the day the hallowed saints walk the earth will be full of temptations and creatures who are quite the opposite of hallowed) if you dress up horribly enough, you might convince the dark folk who wander that your house is already full of dark folk – and no more need apply.

An old, old tradition, the warding off of the dark.  Which may explain the explosion of joy in the skies the night before Christ was born.

But all I knew, when I was little, was that there was something magic, something so wildy un-normal about the coming night of Halloween, thinking about it made my heart race with excitement.  My mother, who back then was a seamstress of no small ability, made us wonderful costumes; my sister and I were cats one year, with fuzzy suits that zipped up the front, and ears and painted on whiskers.  The fact that people kept asking if I was a mouse was annoying, but not crushing.

Then the kids started making things, like Cam’s little wooden ghost there.  And a wooden pumpkin on a stick in the background.  Mixed with metal luminarios and other treasures on the hearth.

And we were out in the chilly night, running from house to house with a whole horde of fierce strangers (have you seen the Halloween scene from Meet Me in Saint Louis?).  And then – the candy.  Stuff I couldn’t get for myself, raining out of the skies.  You’d never know what you’d gathered till you got home and dumped it all on the floor – to be sorted out and gloated over.  And then taken away and parceled out by parents over the following weeks.

But that was the climax of it.

It was the build-up that I loved.  Early in October, mother showed us how to cut pumpkins and cats out of construction paper  – silhouettes to make our windows deliciously spooky.  After a few years, it occurred to me that if you cut two cats or pumpkins at once, then sandwiched them with aluminum foil core, you’d get satisfyingly fiery eyes.

I don’t know where I came up with this idea: you cut a frame out of each of two sheets of black paper, and you glue wax paper across the opening you’ve framed on each piece.  So you’ve made something like a computer monitor with wax paper as a screen.  Then you cut out a moon and a cat or a pumpkin face  – a spooky scene and you glue the pieces on the wax paper, sandwiching the whole thing together so you have a sort of shadowbox, silhouette, and you hang that in the window so the light will stream through.  We did that, too.

Okay.  This is a graphical representation of the pictures I always used to draw in school at this point in the year.  Picture it done in heavy watercolor.  And the fence always made it all the way across the page, with the wheat sheaf behind.  But I did the best I could to remember it this morning.  Always the clouds drifting across the moon.

So, when I was a grown up girl, I made it into a quilt.  Drifting clouds done in quilting lines.

My mom did this stuff with us.   Thinking back, I honestly think this one was of her favorite holidays, too.  So I did these things with my kids.  And added more – a porch ghost that talks to the children (like the one they always had up the block when I was growing up – how could that ghost SEE me?).  Bats hanging from the porch ceiling.  Candy corn candles.  Glass pumpkins full of autumn treats.

I think, ultimately, that the experience of Halloween should be a celebration of light.  All the old, old traditions – they have their roots in the concepts of what is good and what is not – a basic lesson old as Adam.  But the celebration will make no sense (past silliness and gleeful greed) to your children if you don’t think the thing through and talk about it.  You can steer the sense of it, savoring the fun without teaching the wrong lessons.

I am kind of the illustrator level of quilting.  Love the fabrics and love to use the textures in the story telling.  Also love plaids.  I borrowed the corn stocks from a book I’m sure I still have somewhere.  The rest of this is my own little design.

Love quilting the pumpkin lines, too.  I thought these were fun fabrics.

Am most proud of my bat.  Made him up myself.  And now I’m asking myself – bats on the brain?

I think that, for me even as a child, the whole celebration is just a cultural manifestation of something more primal: the physical thrill the body gets – of fear and anticipation, of gratitude for shelter, of our constant flirtation with the edges of night – when the nights begin to turn chill in earnest. I felt this, even in Los Angeles.

This little quilt is not my design, but it IS the quilt that lured me into practicing the craft.  I saw it hanging in Fabric Mill and had to do it.

This is an AWFUL< AWFUL shot.  I’ll do it again later, better.  It was really dark when I shot this.  S-l-0-w shutter speed, and I don’t hold still all that well.  These are hand-dyed fabrics.  I’ll really have to do a better shot, because these turned out loverly.  I dyed them on my driveway.

Cats and moons.  Cats and moons.  Maybe my old picture motif actually had the cat arched against the moon.  Maybe, maybe.  Why can’t I remember?  It’s only been, like, fifty years ago –

The garden quilt.  I stole the concept from someone (up at Quilts Etc.)  who had stolen the concept from a book I never did buy.  That’s our collie up there in the upper right hand corner.

Gee. Whose front hall is this? Bag of apples, purloined from the lawn next door (we actually have permission to gather).  See how the lens bends what should be the parallel lines of the door way in so that they seem closer at the bottom?  Those great big old box cameras people used to use – the ones they had to mount on a tri-pod, and throw cloths over their heads to use?  That kind of camera, with what’s called “swings and tilts,” could take this shot and keep those walls perfectly straight.  (This moment brought to you by . . .)

Scary skeleton drawn by the great Murph about twelve years ago, with some help by Chaz, doctor in training (no, she changed her mind when she considered the fact that you have to work with REAL bodies to be a doctor).  She was able to help because she had memorized all the bones in the body by the time she was six – thanks to the fact that Ginna had gotten The Invisible Woman for Christmas.  So you can see how  anatomically (SP??) correct this is.

Two days ago, Murphy finally explained what those yellow things in the stomach are.  They are teeth.  The logic here: when you lose teeth, they go down, right?  I think this is a very efficient GI set-up.  I have kept this thing because – well, I mean – how can you throw brilliant kid stuff away?  They get such a thrill when they see it twelve years later.

Now.  For the bats.  Here are three bat ideas.  I have included the flitty bats templates here, too.  These bats above were maes.de by – I don’t remember who.  Chaz?  Gin? (Chaz.)  They are in two pieces.  You cut out the wings.  And you cut out the body/face.  For all you Waldorf schoolers out there: the smiles were put on these bats by the CHILDREN themselves.

What you are missing here is the scream.  I tried to shoot these things (twirly bats) for ten minutes, but the top one would spin to the right and the bottom one to the left and they wouldn’t line up and it was dark and blurry- and suddenly *scream* and grab and so you see my hand.  The bat, as you see, thinks this is funny.

Flitty bats.

Last, but hardly least, the first bats I made.  I took black felt and cut the wings and little horn things out of one continuous piece.  Then glued thin black pipe cleaners along the entire top edge.  Then added a small puff for the head, and a larger one for the body, and stuck on googly eyes.  We pinned these to the walls and hung them from the ceiling fans (bat race!  bat race!) and most of them have one eye now, but we still love them.

FLASH: if you want to KNIT bats, go to Linda.

Anyway, whatever it is, I have loved Halloween and all its glorious symbols, and gloat every year over the mix of orange and black on my hearth.  Oh – and I love wandering around the neighborhood with the kids, seeing all the neighbors – all of us out and waving  – like a party in the street.  Or, barring that, opening the door to friends and family over and over again.

See?  All I need is you standing here in the opening with your bag open and your eyes wide.  But you might want to wait till we hang the talking ghost.  It’ll scare your socks off.