Never jump into a pile of leaves with a wet sucker, and other lessons

I've had to spend my weekday hours breadwinning instead of blogging lately, but today really warrants a pause--a slightly grander and more celebratory pause than the kind I've been allowing myself most of the working week, which have consisted of the giddy, guilty inhalation of fun-sized candy while hunched over proofs.

I love Halloween.

I used to plan the costumes elaborately. I'm not talking princesses. At age nine, the getup involved traffic-cone-orange spider tights under cutoffs, topped with a faux-bloodied shirt on which I'd painted tire tracks. I think I billed myself as a run-over corpse. One year--a middle school year, in my defense--found me constructing an elaborate cardboard torso with noodly arms and a hole at the base. I buttoned the thing into my father's trench coat, stuck my head through the hole so the torso towered on my shoulders, and rigged it so the arms cradled my head. I was a seven-foot headless person. With braces. With bangs that I curled as if my social life depended on it.

One year in early high school when Halloween fell on a weekday and it was cool to dress up, to my own nervous delight and the confusion of others, I came as the opposite of myself. This meant a short skirt, a lot of makeup, hair that was teased or crimped or otherwise abused into large defiance, probably a padded bra, and the conspicuous absence of books.

My best costume made an appearance two years ago, when, after visits to Goodwill and greater Boston's Halloween mecca, the incomparable Garment District, I became a park rangerette. The basics: a short khaki skirt, flesh-colored fishnets, knee boots, a well-stuffed forest-green shirt, a National Park badge that took all my atrophied arts-and-crafts skills to create, a plastic rifle that made cartoon gun noises, a wig with long, flaming-red hair that I put in pigtails, and a big-brimmed hat that said SMOKEY. The prize for these efforts: one of the better pictures of me that's been taken to date.

I think the two greatest Halloween rituals--the ones I still try to approximate, the ones that still leak happy nostalgia--are 1) the careful sorting of one's caloric bounty, and 2) the annual viewing of the brilliant 1966 Peanuts Halloween special (which I let myself do only once a year). Both yield about twenty minutes of predictable bliss. The best parts: stacking Reese's products by type, and the segment where Snoopy becomes a World War I Flying Ace. When he's skulking around the sleeping, war-torn French countryside to that eerie music, I squeal, without fail. And it's rich with life lessons ("I've learned there are three things you don't discuss with people: religion, politics, and the Great Pumpkin," etc.).

One sad part about growing up is that the ghost story collections that once got toted to every sleepover, that were busted out the week of Halloween and read by flashlight to great effect, no longer have the spooky draw they once had. But for the kids in your life, or in the hope of approximating some of that old feeling, my favorites were these: In a Dark, Dark Room and Other Scary Stories and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (and its sequels; these are the ones with the drippy illustrations that still have the power to scare me).

But I've grown up. There's trick-or-treating in my office today. It extends to baked goods, including the goopy concoction I'm eating as "breakfast," which came from the math department and contains booze.

My delightful immediate boss, E, and I have donned cat masks and were spooning this up just now when I told her that I was having trouble tasting the peach schnapps. At that moment, the math director--who made the stuff--walked by.

"Oh, there's more in my office if you need it," she said, as if I'd asked for salt or pepper. "Kahlua, too, for the chocolate one. Big bottles."

My director, my real boss, is out today.

There are no fewer than two Sarah Palins in my office today.

One Lady Editor just gophered over the cubicle wall and said to a younger, shy, non-costumed editor in a sweater vest, eagerly, cheerfully, "Are you Joe Biden?"

[Pregnant pause.]

"No."

And it's still morning.