The day after Halloween is its own particular emotion, just as the day after Christmas is a particular emotion. The day after a holiday is never exactly happy, and is necessarily defined by a hangover of one kind of another (in this case: candy; in my specific case; candy corn), but the day after Halloween is perhaps my favorite of these after-the-parade feelings. October’s over, and all the candy’s on sale. There is the first bite of winter in the air, and autumn settles in to something serious, something more about mortality than about pumpkins and the colors of the leaves. This is the time for the real ghosts, this dying season a large lumbering thing in its last blinks before sleep. This is when the morbid feels unspeakably cozy, when the reminder of our fragile skeletons aching close beneath our skin makes us draw tighter together and pull up to the fire, pile up the blankets and hold close beneath them. These are the small precious days at the end of something, slipping through our hands, rushing into the dark. And then there’s the candy. Half-price abundance sings off the shelves. We sit on couches all day long and exuberantly gorge ourselves, refusing to grow out of a childhood that spent the day after Halloween in a sugar coma under a long grey sky.
Halloween
Halloween
Halloween
The day after Halloween is its own particular emotion, just as the day after Christmas is a particular emotion. The day after a holiday is never exactly happy, and is necessarily defined by a hangover of one kind of another (in this case: candy; in my specific case; candy corn), but the day after Halloween is perhaps my favorite of these after-the-parade feelings. October’s over, and all the candy’s on sale. There is the first bite of winter in the air, and autumn settles in to something serious, something more about mortality than about pumpkins and the colors of the leaves. This is the time for the real ghosts, this dying season a large lumbering thing in its last blinks before sleep. This is when the morbid feels unspeakably cozy, when the reminder of our fragile skeletons aching close beneath our skin makes us draw tighter together and pull up to the fire, pile up the blankets and hold close beneath them. These are the small precious days at the end of something, slipping through our hands, rushing into the dark. And then there’s the candy. Half-price abundance sings off the shelves. We sit on couches all day long and exuberantly gorge ourselves, refusing to grow out of a childhood that spent the day after Halloween in a sugar coma under a long grey sky.