Yeshim Iqbal

Halloween! By far the most fun of the American celebrations, in my personal opinion. Build up to Halloween in our house has gone on for some time, thanks to Kate and Emily and Ryah and Cian’s enthusiasm (I love Halloween too, but my personal enthusiasm is expressed mostly by sitting in my rocking chair, eating candy corn, and loudly making comments about how I forgot to check my blood sugar today again).

For instance, our house was invaded a week or two ago by two roughly three-year-old size ghosts, as you can see here.

Very spooky indeed. And there have been Halloween decorations. There’s been a pumpkin or two. There’s been a lot of candy. There’s been a dish of some kind of confusing marshmallow concoction with edible eyeballs that the kids promptly started peeling off and eating after school today.

And of course, there was Halloween itself last night! Ryah was BATTY. No seriously, she was a bat. By Ryah’s instruction, Kate, Emily and Joey were all hedgehogs. Emily made almost all the costumes of course. Here we are before trick or treating.

Cian was a ‘spooky witch.’ By his instruction, I was a skeleton. Kate got me the fabulous skeleton t-shirt. Cian’s long floppy witch hat from Em was adorable. Here he is walking down the street with his Nanu (you may have noticed that in general, I don’t put photos of kids on the internet, but you must look at the adorable hat and cape right now. But if you see Cian this week, tell him how spooky he was, not how cuuuute).

And yes! His Nanu is in town! Ammu arrived last week. Dramatic times! But stories about visas/lack of visas/COVID/travel drama shall be saved for another time. For now, let’s just say it was such a delight to have Ammu around for trick or treating and Halloween festivities.

The kids, of course, were INCREDIBLY excited about trick or treating. This manifested in them charging down the sidewalk together, shrieking. Mostly usually running by the houses and people that had candy, and having to be stopped by one of us, or a kind member of the public that realized what was going on. We also had to work on them actually saying “Trick or Treat” nicely instead of bellowing, “I WANT CANDY” or as the evening progressed, just “CANDY, CANDY, CANDY!” Cian thoughtfully studied people’s buckets of candy and would select one piece or perhaps two. Once he took two when Nanu told him to take just one and he got flustered and tried to give some of it back. On the other hand, Ryah was, in the words of one of our neighbors, “an enterprising young lady.” You can imagine for yourself what that means. Regardless of their individual trick or treating styles, they both ended up with pretty serious hauls of candy. Especially because it turns out that bodega trick-or treating is a thing? I did not know about this intriguing phenomenon. Emily had to explain to me that in New York it’s perfectly normative to walk into a little deli on Halloween and expect the shopkeeper to dump a handful of lollipops into your bag. We have quite a few of these little shops near our house. So their trick or treating bags (which had flashing lights and got a lot of compliments and that I think I will start using as a purse) got impressively heavy, but they kept refusing any offers to help carry them until they were basically dragging them along the sidewalk.

We only really walked down one block and back up another block and came back home. It took about an hour. It was plenty. We got home and all sat on the stoop and tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to strategize about how to regulate toddler sugar intake on Halloween. Here’s me and Kate at the end of the evening. Disheveled, sugared up, pretty gosh darn tired, but hugely satisfied. Happy Halloween!