Goblins chortling, witches cackling or ghosts jumping up from behind a plastic tombstone do not phase the child. He laughs and runs up to look at every store or yard display while his older cousin cowers behind the nearest adult.
Spooky, scary things have fascinated the youngest grandson for more than a year. In the spring he grabbed the King Kong mask at the rummage sale and walked around growling at everyone.
A wintery trip to a new library found him making a bee-line for books with spooky pictures. “Every time,” his father’s said shaking his head in disbelief. “He can’t even see the pictures and he pulls out that kind of book every time.”
In the summer his mother found a used magazine with that featured colorful, pages of ideas of food, decorations and costumes for Halloween. It immediately became his favorite picture book. One day my daughter cut out those pages, stapled them together and gave it to him.
His face lit up with a huge smile, “Thank you, thank you!” He took it off to his room to study his mommy made book.
That booklet became the blueprint for his third birthday.
“You are welcome dress-up in fun, not scary clothes for a Halloween birthday party,” his mom wrote on the invitations to his third birthday party.
The night before the party, she and I stayed up late working on party preparations as we chatted. She made over-sized cupcakes to decorate before the party and a dozen each of miniature chocolate and vanilla cupcakes for the children to decorate during the party. We left the cupcakes to cool overnight.
She mentioned that she had an excess of eggs. I suggested deviled eggs for the party. She not only made deviled eggs, she plopped a plastic spiders on top of each bold yellow eye — and impressed the mothers of the birthday guests.
The day of his party, the birthday boy and I woke up first. He played quietly with his toys while I finished dressing.
Too quietly, I realized when I walked in the kitchen. Three, vanilla mini-cupcakes with their tops bitten off tumbled across the counter with a few stray crumbs on the floor. The crimped paper wrappers stymied him. He watched me staring at the cupcakes and ran to the couch – where he had left a trio of half-eaten chocolate cupcakes crumbled on the couch. I shoved the rest of the cupcakes out of his reach.
“I was hooongree,” he explained.
His momma gave him a breakfast sandwich, apple slices and a cup of grapes. He ate all of it and then went to a one-year-old’s house for a morning birthday party. His own birthday party came after nap time.
As I helped her decorate the big cupcakes with jack-o-lantern faces, ghostly shapes and harvest moons, she said, “We need that magazine. It had a picture of a friendly monster face.” She pulled it out from where he had dropped it and gave it to me. “Try copying that.”
I made a passable green face with black sprinkles for hair.
His mother grabbed mismatched clothes and called herself a fashion designer. His dad pulled out a cowboy hat, boots and rifle and declared he was a hunter. His cousin came as a ghost. The birthday boy wore a “doctor in training” outfit.
When his other grandpa came, he was handed a basket with Easter eggs decorated with Jack-o-lantern faces and asked, “Please hide these around the backyard.” The kids didn’t care about the spring colors, they just enjoyed the fun of racing around finding the toy filled eggs.
The children quickly shed the costume excess and ran in circles around the big back yard while the adults prepared hot dogs. The hot dogs disappeared from the counter, so I guess the hooongree little boys ate a few before they lined up at the edge of the porch covered with a plastic tablecloth. Sprinkles, chocolate chips, other flavors of chips, tubes of icing and 18 small cupcakes awaited their chubby little hands. With earnest faces the pre-schoolers squeezed on yellow, orange, green and black frosting, dunked the cakes in sprinkles or carefully placed a chip on top.
I don’t think more than a few bites made it into their stomachs, but their moms snapped plenty of photos.
With the lighting of three candles, guests grabbed cameras and focused – too late the child blew out the flames before we finished the first phrase of “Happy Birthday.”
“Wait, let’s do it again,” his mom reached for the lighter and began re-lighting candles, he blew as she lit the last candle. She tried again. He ignored the cameras and did his birthday job. He blew out the candles.
We preserved that moment with our photographic memories so he could unwrap presents and say “thank you” for each gift.
Last year, after the season passed, his parents had found the perfect gift for a boy fascinated with Halloween icons: a Matchbox road inside a haunted house with hidden doors and paths that wound up and down three floors. Relishing the clearance price, they tucked it away for 10 months.
Once the other guests left, he and his cousin settled down to a boys’ only world of cars and things that go bump in the night – too busy to even consider being hooongree.