Text copyright © 2022 by Jenny Lawson

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ISBN-13: 9781662511110 (digital)

Cover design by Philip Pascuzzo

Cover image: ©azndc / Getty Images; © DR NEIL OVERY/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY / Getty Images; © aluxum / Getty Images; © Faba-Photograhpy / Getty Images; © Bill Boch / Getty Images

I’ve always thought that there are two kinds of people. There are those of us who love the holidays and those of us who are incredibly lazy. By “incredibly lazy” I mean the kind of person who judges their own merit by the sizzle reel everyone else seems to have on Instagram, highlighting their ability to use an oven, their more than four plates, and/or, for some odd reason, their matching pajamas. And while I envy the energy, determination, ability to manipulate social media, and shared insanity of those people, it’s become very clear to my family and me that we—well, we are not those people.

Year before last, I didn’t get my Christmas tree up at all. Between my depression and my rheumatoid arthritis, I have to pick and choose what I can do before I fall into a light coma. So, year before last, when COVID-19 first kept us all homebound, I wrapped presents and skipped the tree. Last year I did manage to get my mysteriously heavy and incredibly awkward fake Christmas tree up and decorated with our boxes of old, kitschy ornaments that all manage to clash with each other somehow, which was very gratifying, and I would like a medal thankyouverymuch.

I could actually pin that medal on my Christmas tree right now, as I am currently writing this in the 103-degree Texas heat, and it is fucking still up. Half of the lights have burned out, and I can only assume my neighbors think we’ve died and are currently mummifying in the house. This is month 1,792 of living in a pandemic (I may have lost count), and sometimes you need all the twinkling lights and Star Wars ornaments you can get in your life.

Of course, putting up the Christmas tree meant that I had no energy for things like wrapping presents, so we did the usual thing where the couch is the wrapping. Usual for us, that is . . . I understand this may not be normal for anyone else. But, technically, wrapping paper is there only to hide the present until Christmas. If you hide everything behind the couch and then scream the name of your family member while you pull the gift out and launch it at them, it’s just as much of a surprise (possibly more if they’re not paying attention). It’s also ecologically friendly. You are saving paper—shiny, petroleum-based paper. So maybe I’m not only lazy. I’m carbon neutral. And lightly concussed from a box set of Steely Dan.

(Except now that I’m thinking about it, I was likely grunting out tons of carbon dioxide as I furiously torpedoed presents across the room from behind the couch. So maybe I shouldn’t be bragging about this whole thing. My husband, Victor, is reading over my shoulder and agrees that I absolutely should not be bragging about any of this, but not for the same reason.)

I suspect it might be different if we had a big family. It’s usually just me, Victor, and our teenager, Hailey, and none of us is very oriented toward the holidays. We don’t really cook (aside from Hailey, who can bake a mean cookie 85 percent of the time if they don’t mix up the baking soda and baking powder), so while most families are planning giant feasts with tons of people bringing too much food, Thanksgiving and Christmas are simply days when we must forage to make sure we don’t starve, as most restaurants are closed.

We have eaten drive-through Taco Cabana for Christmas dinner so often it’s practically a tradition. A terrible, slightly mortifying tradition. But they do offer drive-through margaritas, so that’s nice. And now that I’m thinking about it, they can’t legally serve you a mixed margarita in the drive-through because Texas has open-container laws, so they always give me a virgin margarita and a handful of those cheap airplane-booze tequilas, and then I always have to mix it myself when I get home, so technically I think that counts as me cooking on Christmas. (Victor disagrees. Again.)

Thanksgiving is similar, except that I do actually have a dish that I cook that day. You mix a can of cranberry sauce with a can of mandarin oranges and eat it out of a cereal bowl while your family questions your life choices.

So, yes, to most in rural Texas, “the holidays” means Christmas, Hannukah, or Thanksgiving. But, to me, there is only one holiday that reigns supreme. The glorious, dark queen of the year, Halloween. While we are professional underachievers on Thanksgiving and Christmas, I fucking shine on Halloween. It is my favorite day of the year, and my house is filled with spooky, dark decorations year-round. You might think this is because I’ve forgotten to take down my Halloween decorations from past years, and you would be right.

But it’s also semi-intentional because Halloween is 365 days a year in this house and that means that the human skull the size of a side table in the foyer is a permanent installation, as is the Victorian cabinet of curiosities in the next room, which is filled with boxes of graveyard dirt, glass eyeballs, ancient locusts, articulated bird skeletons, and velvet-covered skulls. I am one of the small group of people who go to Halloween stores not for temporary plastic decorations but for actual interior design ideas. When I meet with people on Zoom, they stare into the terrifyingly dead gaze of dozens of unsmiling big-eyed dolls on shelves behind me. My office is filled with horror books, death masks, mummified Fiji mermaids, and the souls of Victorian children. (The last part is just a guess, but I can only assume that’s what the dolls eat.) It is also filled with animals. Which sounds comforting until I admit that almost all of them are dead.

This only sounds disturbing. I was brought up here in Texas with an emotionally questionable but entertaining taxidermist for a father, so dead animals are in my blood. (Not literally because I’m pretty sure that would give you salmonella at least.) In fact, as I was writing this, my parents emailed me pictures of a ten-foot-tall arch they made out of skulls and antlers to welcome people to their property. In New York I’m pretty sure that sort of thing would be seen as a threat, but this is essentially Texan for “Welcome home.”

I have inherited a bit of this madness, but mine is not as strange because the hundreds of taxidermied animals I’ve collected have all either died of natural causes or are old, damaged relics pulled out of resale shops, and all of them are wearing clothes.

Victor notes that dressing up dead animals in clothes actually makes my madness much more strange, and I’m officially banning him from reading over my shoulder because he is 100 percent wrong. In my office roadkill squirrels dance in ’50s swinging dresses, bobcats wear top hats and monocles, dozens of taxidermied mice perform each day in a tiny circus tent beneath the longing gaze of my (living) cats. A full-size standing bear leans against my computer as I write this, staring out the window at our neighbors, who think we’re maybe dead but definitely insane. The bear was rescued from a bar that closed and is missing an ear, some of its nose, and large patches of fur, but you don’t even notice it because you’re too distracted by the fact that . . . it’s Ruth Bader Ginsbear holding a gavel in her mangy, wonderful paw. The whole house is a delight. A dark, bizarre, slightly unsettling delight.

Just like Halloween.

Even when I was little, I adored the strange mystery of Halloween, although it was a very different sort of holiday than kids experience today. Costumes in the ’70s and ’80s were a strange sort of thing, back before giant Halloween stores temporarily popped up inside whatever big-box store had gone bankrupt the year before. Perhaps it was different where you lived, but in West Texas, most of us had to make our own costumes out of what we had in the house, which is why so many of us were dressed as hobos. It’s easy now to look back and see how incredibly insensitive it was to dress masses of children up as homeless people for fun, but at the time we were all too busy worrying about the hordes of satanists roaming neighborhoods looking for children and black cats to sacrifice, which was an actual issue that every single child was warned about in America. Looking back now, it seems strange that I spent so much of my childhood on alert for roving satanists and unmarked quicksand, neither of which ended up being nearly as much of a problem in my real life as I had been led to believe.

This was a gentle and naive time before the internet, when all our information came from urban legends and terrifying local news reports. “What hidden dangers in your pantry are waiting to murder your family?” . . . or the urgent life-or-death inquiries, such as “Can playing records backward hypnotize your children?” or “Will gang members hide under your car and stab you with heroin needles when you stop to get gas?” Tune in tomorrow. Story at eight, when we come back. I suppose it’s not that different from the insane bullshit your crazy aunt shares on Facebook now, but it somehow felt like the scary news spread even quicker back in the ’70s and ’80s, when it seemed like everyone at school had heard of a friend of a friend of a friend who’d been given candy laced with razor blades. This became such a concern that you were actually encouraged to take your Halloween candy to the ER so they could x-ray it for you.

It was a tantalizing story, and parents everywhere were on high alert, but my classmates and I were skeptical as we discussed the logistics while finger painting. How could you fit an entire razor blade into a piece of candy? It seemed physically impossible. An apple, maybe, but only maniacs give out apples for Halloween, and none of us were falling for that bullshit.

Today kids come home with miniature Snickers or sealed boxes of Nerds, but in my childhood, it was not unusual to come home with a grab bag of trash and treasure . . . everything from homemade popcorn balls that would crack your teeth, ancient unwrapped ribbon candy stuck to other ribbon candy, circus peanuts, loose candy corn, spare change, sticks of gum pulled from grannies’ purses . . . it was always a surprise. Not that I knew much about that because we lived in the country, where we were far too removed from other houses to trick-or-treat. No, Halloween at our house looked very different. This is that story.

My editor: OMG, YOU ARE JUST NOW GETTING TO THE ACTUAL STORY?

Me: Well, yes. But in my defense, I am being paid by the word.

My editor: You know you aren’t actually being paid by the word, right?

Me: What?

My editor: Yeah. Also, your responses just got a lot shorter now that you know you’re not getting paid by the word.

Me: Yes, but if there aren’t any rules then . . . I mean . . . The End?

My editor: Nope.

Me: But I need to finish Netflix.

My editor: Finish what on Netflix?

Me: Just finish Netflix. All of it. I think I’m close.

My editor: You can’t finish Netflix.

Me: Well, that sounds like a challenge. Also, clearly you haven’t had the same pandemic I have.

My editor: Back to work, weirdo.

Me: Fine, but I’m leaving all of this in, and also let me tell you about everything that’s happened this season on Bridgerton because I—

My editor: Again . . . not getting paid by the word.

Me: Oh yeah. Fuck.

My editor: This Halloween stuff is great, but can it also be about Christmas?

Me: SORRY, I HAVE TO GET BACK TO WRITING.

Okay, where was I?

Right. Halloween, vintage rural-Texas-style.

When I was growing up, you couldn’t really buy costumes, like I said. Actually, that’s not entirely true because you could go to the Halloween half aisle at the Piggly Wiggly and pick out one of the five available store-bought costumes. These mass-market getups consisted of a small, hard-plastic mask that had a tiny mouth slit, which would cut the shit out of your lips, and scratchy eye holes to give you corneal abrasions, accompanied by a large plastic garbage bag printed with the image of what an actual costume would look like if you weren’t wearing a garbage bag. You would wear this garbage bag and people would use their imagination, I guess, and I desperately wanted one of these terrible, cheap, shitty costumes. I’ve heard rumors that, in other towns, there were larger selections, but in our town, it was Spider-Man, G.I. Joe, E.T., Princess, and Bride. (Just to clarify, “Princess” was one costume. “Bride” was another. The Princess Bride was an excellent movie and an even better book, but no one was dressing as Robin Wright, although that would have been awesome.) I remember thinking it was shitty that there were fewer options for girls, but it didn’t matter because I craved the glamour of the pink princess garbage bag and a mask that would make you look like you had a terrible case of childhood herpes by the end of the night.

My little sister, Lisa, held the plastic Bride costume up to her tiny kindergarten frame and modeled it.

“It doesn’t have any powers,” she said. “It doesn’t even have a name. Just ‘Bride.’”

She was, of course, correct. The boy-focused costumes were all powerful and specific, and Lisa felt conflicted but less because of the now-obvious offensiveness of being a literal child bride and more because of the vagueness of the costume.

I considered her, holding a costume that was such patriarchal garbage it was almost ironic. “You could be Bride of Spider-Man. Or married to G.I. Joe. Mrs. Joe.”

She frowned, no doubt imagining the demanding life as the wife of a contract killer. (We didn’t watch G.I. Joe because it came on at the same time as Monchhichis, so we made some assumptions.)

“Mrs. E.T.,” she said finally, and I high-fived her as we set back feminism several years from the specialty aisle of the Piggly Wiggly.

This is where I would show you a picture of these terrible costumes, and you would either go “Jesus, that is so much worse than I imagined” or “I was Mrs. E.T. in 1982 too! SISTER WIVES!” but I can’t do that because my mother saw us and was like, “Ew. No. Put those down before you get mouth herpes.”

The entire Piggly Wiggly episode was very disappointing to everyone, probably most of all to my mother, who hand sewed several amazing Halloween costumes for my sister and me that we never entirely appreciated because this was an era before things like that were cool.

Nowadays it’s impossible to imagine not having three hundred photographs of your child every Halloween, but this was an era where photographs depended entirely on whether your parents had a few untaken snaps available on a film roll they hadn’t finished during vacation, so you’ll have to just imagine some of these:

Age 2—ghost. Made from patterned sheets tied with yarn around my neck because choking hazards didn’t yet exist.

Age 3—witch. Handmade by my badass mother. My sister inherits the choking-hazard ghost, and I get to twirl around with a full-size broom right beside her.

Age 4—witch again because, to paraphrase my mother, You will wear this shit until you outgrow it.

Age 5—after a fortunate growth spurt (plus some side-eye from the fundamentalist church we were attending at the time), my parents work through the night to surprise me with something less objectionable . . . a handmade angel costume. Lisa wears the witch costume because, while pleasing God is important, he’s not paying the bills, y’all. We enact several battles between good and evil and, of course, good always wins because I’m bigger and know choke holds.

Age 6—angel. Again.

Age 7—look, there’s not enough vodka or room here for me to go into the trauma of age seven. Give me a minute. We’ll come back to it.

Age 8+—Whatever I could come up with using the stuff from my closet. Dallas Cowboys’ cheerleader, vampire, clown, Groucho Marx for some reason. Around age twelve I decided to be a punk-rock singer and wrote “Rock and Roll” on one cheek and drew a lightning bolt on the other with a permanent marker, which I immediately got in trouble for because it stayed on all week, but in my defense, that was probably the only punk-rock aspect of the whole outfit, which included a fake-leather miniskirt, leg warmers, and socks with sandals.

Compared to today’s Halloween costumes, these look a bit pathetic, but I think it’s pretty impressive what we created with just our imaginations and poor fashion choices. And technically we didn’t have to look that great to trick-or-treat because we lived in the country and were surrounded by cotton fields. Going door-to-door was never going to be an option.

This isn’t to say that we didn’t trick-or-treat when we were very little. We totally did. My parents may have been poor, but they were inventive and wanted us to experience the same things as normal kids, but in a safer way; so my mom had my sister and me run laps around our house in the dark and knock on the door, and then my mom would pretend to be different people every time as she dropped caramels and cooking chocolate into our bags. Honestly getting the exact same candy each time was a bit meh, but she switched it up by offering us bites of mashed potatoes or other leftovers from dinner and sometimes pretending not to be home at all, which I thought was very creative at the time but, now that I think about it, may have just been when she was mixing herself a drink and needed a minute of quiet.

It was actually a little terrifying. The country nights were pitch black, and Lisa was dressed as a ghost and kept tripping on her sheet, so it felt like each lap around our tiny house took an hour, but in an exhilarating and thrilling sort of way, as I was still very much on the lookout for satanists, who I saw lurking in every shadow. I swear that each time we raced around the darkest side of the house, I held my breath because each time it seemed that a large, shadowy figure drew closer out of the darkness. I told myself it was probably my imagination and decided against telling my mother because I knew she’d say that meant it was time to come in, and it was worth the risk of satanists to acquire still more caramels (this was during those childhood years when sneaking a spoonful of sugar to get you through the day was perfectly acceptable). So we kept racing around the house, and each time the figure seemed a little closer, and I told myself it was a bush that just happened to be six feet tall and was mobile for some reason, and this is exactly why children can’t be expected to make good decisions because the last time I went around the house, I saw the enormous hulking figure standing before us, blocking our path. Lisa’s ghost sheet had slipped down her face, so she was unaware of our impending doom as she said, “Why are we stopping?” but I didn’t have the breath to scream.

The giant creature’s long stringy hair fluttered in the breeze, and it laughed in a low, guttural way as it peered down at us, and I considered pushing Lisa ahead as a small sacrifice but then the figure lurched forward and yelled, “BOO!” and this is when I immediately peed myself, which was not planned but recently I read that peeing yourself is actually a good thing to do when you’re being kidnapped because kidnappers are grossed out by pee, I guess? Clearly, I was ahead of my time. A second later, still mid-pee, I realized it was my father in clown makeup, wearing my discarded pom-pom on his head like a fright wig and laughing hysterically. This was the night I discovered that bored parents can be dangerous and that it is very hard to wash urine out of tennis shoes.

Despite the urine and the fact that my mother confiscated half of our caramels, I love this memory. In her defense, she used them to make caramel apples, which were delicious and much tastier than the pumpkin seeds she’d made earlier from the insides of our carved pumpkins, which smelled delicious but tasted like lies, or actually exactly as bad as you’d expect a roasted vegetable to taste like when you’re eight.

(Wait . . . are pumpkin seeds vegetables? Because nuts and seeds are protein, so doesn’t that mean they’re meat? Hang on. Let me google it. Decide among yourselves which team you’re on. Jesus Christ. Google says pumpkins are fruits. WORST BERRY EVER.)

My editor: Again. Not being paid by the word.

Me: I know but, like, this seems important and is probably the most educational part of this whole essay. Did you know that pumpkins were berries?

My editor: For real? I thought they were gourds.

Me: They are squashes, gourds, AND fruits. They are the most trying-too-hard of all the foods.

My editor: Wait, does that mean watermelons are berries? Are cucumbers gourds?

Me: YES AND YES. ALL BETS ARE OFF. TRUST NOTHING.

My editor: This has nothing to do with Halloween. Or Christmas.

Me: Except that pumpkins are the most Halloweeny of foods because they are disguised as a vegetable but they are actually fruits. Is that why we use them at Halloween?

My editor: No idea. Originally people used to carve turnips at Halloween instead of pumpkins and—OMG YOU ARE TRYING TO DISTRACT ME.

Me: Not on purpose. I just haven’t had my ADD meds yet, and I think I’m contagious.

My editor: Please just take the pills and stop fixating on pumpkins. Also, that picture you attached of your sister in her ghost costume . . . does the ghost have lipstick drawn on?

Me: Yeah. And blonde hair and hair bows and very impressive eyebrows and eyelashes. Because we had to make sure people knew she was a girl ghost. Even dead girls have to be attractive. Misogyny really did a number on us.

My editor: Hey, didn’t you say you had a traumatic story to share about your year-seven costume?

Me: Oh my God, I totally do. Thank you. Let’s do that.

SO.

When I was little, we didn’t trick-or-treat,[1] but we did have a tradition of going to our elementary school Halloween fair, which we weren’t allowed to call a Halloween fair because we were too close to the Bible Belt so instead it was a “Fall Festival” that just happened to involve costumes and occasionally was sponsored by the local Catholic church for some reason.

I loved the Fall Festival. My mother was also a big fan because our elementary school was literally our closest neighbor so that meant that everyone parked on our lawn when they got there. This sounds like something you’d involve the police in if you lived in the suburbs, but the half-acre lot nearest the school was usually overgrown and took forever to mow, so the parked cars became a sort of organic community lawn mower. By the time I was in sixth grade, the school started sending a tractor to mow down the two-foot-high johnsongrass the week before the festival because too many people tripped in gopher holes (and we may or may not have started a rumor about some snake holes so that the school would be more likely to get rid of the high grass). Nowadays it’s not necessary because my parents borrow goats, which are basically Mother Nature’s lawn mower—a lawn mower that shits all over the place and would ram you with its head if you got too fucking close.

Back to the trauma: My most memorable Fall Festival was the year I was in second grade. The previous Christmas, Lisa and I had been gifted giant homemade Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls, which Lisa loved and I found horrifying. This seems counterintuitive since I now intentionally collect horrifying dolls, but this particular one felt menacing and insulting, as if it was only posing as a nonchalant and cozy doll and really couldn’t wait until the lights went off so it could eat me with its clownish teeth. This was years before Stephen King’s IT or the ghoulish clown doll from Poltergeist, but I wasn’t falling for any of her bullshit. Have you ever seen the real-life Annabelle doll? Not the one from the movie, but the truly possessed one that terrorized its owners before the Warrens had it blessed and locked it up in a glass box labeled “WARNING—POSITIVELY DO NOT OPEN”? It’s not the grimacing porcelain horror from the Annabelle movies, and I can’t afford to insert the picture of the real Annabelle here because I don’t own that picture but that’s okay because here’s a picture of me holding THE EXACT FUCKING SAME DOLL. (I shit you not. Google it.)

This is a childhood photo of me, on Christmas morning, immediately after being gifted the doll, while screaming “WHAT THE GODDAMN FUCK” with my eyes. (Or the six-year-old equivalent.)

Apparently, my mother was taken with how easy it had been for my aunt Karen to create these fabric nightmares and borrowed her pattern to make the exact same clothes for me and my sister so we could both be Raggedy Ann for Halloween. She painted our noses and cheeks red and drew on eyelashes. Neither of us had red hair, so my mother made wigs out of red yarn and stapled burgundy crepe paper to our heads. (It only sounds bad. She stapled the paper to random strands of our hair, like an impressively inventive early sort of hair extension. I’ve stapled bows to my child’s hair on several occasions, and it’s very effective as long as you’re not going through a metal detector.)

My sister and I remember a photograph of us in the bathroom, me sitting on the toilet as my mother painted my face, but none of us can find it and I suspect I might have thrown it away when angsty teenage me was mortified to discover a picture of myself getting false eyelashes drawn on while presumably pooping. Angsty teen me threw away a lot of stuff that I wish I’d been a little more careful with, including rationality, perspective, and my virginity.

We walked to the school Fall Festival, and the weather was perfectly spooky for once. Dark storm clouds brought the dusk even quicker, and a chilly autumn breeze made everything exciting and wonderful . . . as if anything could happen, despite the fact that every single Fall Festival had the exact same activities each year. They are almost the same activities I witnessed when taking my child to their Halloween school fairs, but maybe it’s different if you’re not in dangerously rustic West Texas, so here is a quick rundown of what you could spend your tickets on:

- The fishing tank: Some unfortunate parent would crouch inside an empty refrigerator box painted blue as small children furiously whipped a bamboo fishing rod tied to a string and a clothespin into the box. The parent would then attach a piece of candy / balloon / Bible verse / trinket to the clothespin, and the child would furiously whip the fishing pole back out, giving welts to the parent and anyone within a six-foot distance.

- The sucker tree: Basically, a two-foot-tall Christmas tree–shaped Styrofoam cone with lots of suckers stuck into it. You paid a ticket and picked a sucker, and if the sucker had a red mark on the end of the stick, you won! Did you win the sucker? No. That would make too much sense. You won the hardest piece of gum imaginable. The marked sucker would go back into the tree where the next kid would immediately pick it because they just saw it shoved back into the tree and would feel both very smart and totally ripped off when they realized they also wasted a ticket for a crappy piece of gum. The sucker tree was well named, really.

- Basketball: You paid a ticket to throw a basketball. I don’t know, y’all. I never did this one.

- Cornhole: You know the garbage you have left after you eat a piece of corn on the cob? Trick question. That’s not garbage at all. It’s a toy! You let it dry out and then try to toss the cob into a hole in a piece of wood, and if you succeed you yell “YEAH! I GOT IT IN THE CORNHOLE!” It’s a sweet, old-fashioned kind of game for the older folk, and also very entertaining for everyone else who is aware that “cornhole” is just slang for “butthole.”

- Cakewalk: a giant circle of numbered squares is drawn on the floor, and you waltz across the squares in time to the square-dancing record (or Czech polka song, depending on who brought the record that year). When the music stops, they draw a number, and if you’re standing on that number, you get to pick out A WHOLE CAKE from the tables that are almost collapsing with homemade cakes donated by every competitive granny in attendance. One year I won two whole cakes, and adult me would have been thrilled, but childhood me was unimpressed and traded both cakes for a package of Red Laces. In hindsight this was a poor trade, but I loved Red Laces, especially because you could take them to school and when people asked for some, you could pull off a piece half the size of your thumb. It was like feeding ducks, but instead it was friends you had to buy with sugar.

- The haunted hayride: Technically it wasn’t haunted at all, but riding in a wagon pulled behind a tractor at night with no lights was always a little terrifying, particularly at the end of the night when the driver was at his drunkest. You could also ride a pig from the pig farm across the street but not legally and only if you were taller than the fence and faster than the pig.

- The costume parade: It was called a parade, but you didn’t actually go anywhere. Instead, it was a popularity contest where everyone would stand around and be judged, which was a lot like a regular day at the elementary school except that this time you were being judged by the parents, who would all choose their own kids.

That year’s costume parade, though, I sort of felt like maybe we had a chance at winning. I was a bit too tall and gangly and not really selling the Raggedy Ann cuteness that I hadn’t wanted to wear in the first place, but Lisa was an adorable moppet, and so if I’d had money, I would have a fiver on her to win. Unfortunately, just as the contest was getting going, the clouds opened up and it began to pour, which was sort of fantastic to everyone there because we lived in a farming community and were almost always in a drought; so it was nice, but I was distracted by the shocked look on the face of the fourth grader (wearing a black leotard and construction paper cat ears) as she stared at me in the same sort of horror I would have loved had I been able to dress up as Sigmund the Sea Monster, which is what I had wanted.

“Are you okay?” she asked, turning a little white as she reached out her hand and pulled it away streaked with red. It was at that moment I realized I was bleeding. Profusely. From my head. And it wasn’t just me. Lisa also had blood pouring down her face and onto her white Raggedy Ann apron. We were tiny versions of Carrie (sans prom gowns), and it was unsettling but also a little bit exciting because murdered Raggedy Ann was exactly the sort of costume I would now pay handsomely for.

Turns out it was actually the unwashed yarn and cheap burgundy crepe paper melting in the rain, and my mom grabbed us and hurried home, but I’d like to think that if we’d stayed a bit longer, we would have won that contest because that sort of transformative costume was well ahead of its time, and the Catholic church always seemed to enjoy a bit of gore and spectacle in its performances.

Sure, it wasn’t a Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese or a bleeding man being nailed to lumber, but it was something. Something strange and dark and unexpected. Something mysterious and entertaining and shocking. Something that made you realize that anything could happen.

It wasn’t Thanksgiving or Christmas. It was Halloween.

And I loved it.

[1] Although one year K’Cee, the neighbor girl from a half mile away, had her dad drive her door to door, and when she got to our house, my mom panicked because we’d already eaten all the caramels and cooking chocolate, and so instead, she threw a handful of pennies into K’Cee’s sack, which was probably disappointing to K’Cee but honestly I’m not sure what she had expected, and I considered telling her she should just be happy she didn’t have piss running down her legs, but I wasn’t sure that story would translate.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jenny Lawson is a very strange girl who has friends in spite of herself. She is perpetually one cat away from being a crazy cat lady.

THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER AVAILABLE NOW FROM HENRY HOLT AND CO.