We Ain't Afraid of No Ghosts
There are dead people up and down our neighborhood. A blood-splattered corpse hanging from a tree. Demons standing on front lawns, waiting. At one house where a maze is being set-up, every kind of ghoul, goblin, and killer clown from outerspace is perched on the roof or floating in the air.
It's Halloween. Maybe not the most wonderful time of the year, but I have to admit, it is one of my favorites. In general, I love look at all the carved Jack O' Lanterns, and we've even found a strand of lights in a nearby bush that looks like furious animal eyes in the dark (the kind you might see at the end of Pirates of the Carribean ride or in a Haunted House attraction). The lights flicker on and off. I kind of want to get a strand of them myself that doesn't flicker, but haven't been able to find one yet.
All that to say, I love the Halloween season, but the more gruesome and splatterific decorations are no fun for me, mostly because I'm worried about the effect they'll have on my child. She's already scared enough. I mean, she got upset watching the Arthur Halloween special when they did a riff on Hansel and Gretel.
So what to do? I mean, we started training for this 5K (erm, kind of. Last week has been so insane we've only actually run once). That means walking and running around the neighborhood. To be fair, most of it I think is over her head. The blood-splattered corpse? She laughed at it.
On the other hand: the house with the goblins, ghouls and Killer Clown? She stared at it with much intensity. (This was in a drive-by on the way to school. We're not walking or running by that house for the next couple weeks.)
So I've taken drastic measures. A couple days ago, I took Claire out for a pumpkin muffin and started teaching her about Halloween Empowerment. I started teaching her that I ain't afraid of no ghost. And then I started playing the Ghostbusters song relentlessly on my iPod on the way to her school and at home. Much to my delight she's now singing "GHOSTBUSTERS!" as loud as she can. Also, "I ain't afraid of no ghost" and "Bustin' makes me feel GOOOOOOOOD!"
I wish I had a DVD of the Mary Poppins/Thriller mash-up, too. Ah, well.
We do the best we can for our children. In my case, that apparently means sheltering mine and teaching them pop songs from the 80s.