HELLO It’s Halloween
MY SON BODHI is two and obsessed with Halloween. He doesn’t know what the day entails. He doesn’t know about trick-or-treating or costumes. What he knows of Halloween comes from the toddler cartoon he watches—endlessly—about a boy and girl who go into a haunted house with ghosts and zombies and vampires and witches, and in each verse of the song being sung—endlessly—is Hello, it’s Halloween.
This cartoon sends my son into an ecstatic jumping frenzy. He says repeatedly one of the clearest words in his limited lexicon: “Halloween.” I’ve watched this cartoon at least a hundred times, but I never tire of my son’s excitement, of his laughter, which is like a sort of enlightenment.
Fatherhood does this. It makes you love things you never thought you would.
OCTOBER USED TO BE a somber month. It wasn’t like December, when my Thai immigrant family transformed our suburban home into a winter wonderland of twinkling lights, and peeking from behind the curtains of our bay windows were the glowing figures of Frosty the Snowman and Santa Claus.
October brought a sense of dislocation. Autumn made the world colder. The color green disappeared, and what prevailed in Chicago was a constant state of gray. That gray lingered into our lives. That gray, I believe, made my family yearn more for the heat of their native home, made them miss what they left behind, what they longed for most.
In October we were on edge, my father double-checking if the doors were locked, my mother praying to the Buddha in our living room for protection. Because we were the first family of color on the block back then, our house was
