I hate spiders.
I’ve always hated them. When I was younger, I had a great two-story playhouse in my yard, but Daddy-Long-Legs loves the wooden structure as much as I do. It seemed like every time I played there, a guy would end up attacking me. I have a creepy feeling that always makes me run out screaming. As I’ve gotten older, my thoughts haven’t changed.
Unfortunately for me, spiders are everywhere during Halloween. Of course, they were fake, but they still made me very, very scared. They hang above the grocery store door, so I have to do my business elsewhere. They come home with toy rings that make me afraid to open the kids’ backpacks. They’re on cereal boxes and I’m afraid to touch them now.
Skeletons don’t scare me; witches are fine. Zombies and Frankenstein’s monster are both fictional creatures, and I enjoy encountering fake ones in the wild this time of year. But spiders are living, breathing creatures (do they breathe? I refuse to Google them, or care to learn anything about them) who lurk in dark corners and build sticky, creepy-looking web, and generally not pleasant. Why are they everywhere during Halloween? You don’t usually see snake or wasp nests used as decorations, so why would a spider web?
I wouldn’t say I have an arachnophobia-level fear of spiders (anywhere from 3 to 15 percent of people have this fear, according to the Cleveland Clinic), but I definitely try to avoid them whenever possible. My kids are not allowed to tease me and I leave the room while we watch Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets Harry and Ron encounter a giant spider in the Forbidden Forest.
Maybe that’s why I never liked Halloween. As a kid, I dressed up in costumes and collected gifts with my friends so as not to be left out (and, of course, to get candy), but as an adult I stopped playing Halloween. “Come to our masquerade!” The invitation was immediately rejected. Contact me when you are hosting your ugly Christmas sweater party.
But once I had kids, I realized there’s nothing better than a little guy jumping around your house in a Tigger costume or a 4-year-old in a full T-Rex costume. The cuteness factor of a baby in any outfit with ears is worth everything we put in to get there.
So, for my first Halloween as a mom, I dressed my 4-month-old in a pumpkin costume and an orange hat, and we headed to the pumpkin patch, where we took about 3,700 photos. The next year, I took a little monkey around our house to collect candies, most of which were eaten by me and his father. Now my kids love Halloween so every year we go all out. We baked pumpkin bread, drank cider, visited the corn maze, and the kids basically asked to hang a ghost on our porch as soon as school started.
I participated in their costume parade. I volunteered at their school party. As a kid who grew up wearing hand-me-down or homemade clothing that I hated, I would even consider dressing up if they asked me to. So far they have rejected my suggestion that we start a family Star Wars theme. If my husband could dress up as Darth Vadar and we could buy our kids a Yoda costume, I would happily be Rey or Leia.
I do love decorating for the holidays, even my least favorite holidays, so every fall I take three dusty boxes out of the basement filled with black cats, old McDonald’s chicken nugget toys, and… With a change of costumes, and any number of pumpkins of all shapes and sizes, our house was transformed.
You won’t find spiders in my decorations, though. If I saw them at someone else’s house while trick-or-treating, I might have to skip that.
Lauren Davidson is a writer and editor from Pittsburgh who focuses on parenting, arts and culture, and weddings. She worked for newspapers and magazines in New England and western Pennsylvania and graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with degrees in English and French. She lives with her editor husband, four energetic children, and an affectionate cat. Follow her on Twitter @laurenmylo.
