Harvest time brings my favorite celebrations of the year. Our House, Bar-en-Acharn, traditionally offers a wonderful feast served by our hobbit members, the best of all cooks in my opinion. Dwarven ales and Elvish wines make for hearty music and expressive dance around the bonfires as the late watches march in. Seregrian, my wonderful mate, is at Her most mirthful. She and I insisted on passing to our children our happy appreciation for the season and its bounty of harvest and good fellowship.
Trick-or-Treating is an unusual custom, in that its origins are clouded by generations of celebrants making of it what they will with their playful imaginations. It is in one respect tied to the rewarding ritual of remembering our ancestors, but most prominently, these days, it has become a fair-warning prank played by disguised children who cheerfully ‘haunt’ the neighbor’s doorsteps, cajoling for treats.
For me, the most memorable of these occasions was with my own children, Bainiel and Ardanion. In their earliest ages, both Seregrian and I would accompany them on their ghostly annual patrol, She and I in comfortable garb, the children dressed as figures from the vast history that my wife has not only chronicled but who also has living memory. On the last year that we would attend the children, Seregrian suggested a change in our family’s spooky autumn expedition; She and I would also ‘dress up.’
My wife chose dark cape and robes decorated with bat images and spidery black lace. With Her lovely long ebony hair, the effect was both alluring and foreboding. But the challenge became deciding a costume for me, a rather plain fellow with bushy brows, oversized broken nose, and a patch covering one missing eye. ‘Pirate’, of course, immediately came to mind but there seemed to be no way to present him in context with Seregrian’s ‘necromancer’. So, the children came up with a totally original idea that had no real historic basis; the ‘Pirate Ghoul’, slave to my wife’s ‘Sorceress’. Bainiel, ever the artist, retrieved her color pigments, and the three of them impishly applied them to my face, hands, and bare feet. Seregrian was particularly keen to color my toenails purple. Shabby work clothes and a worn head bandana completed the ensemble.
With the children under ghostly white sheets with holes for eyes, we ventured into the evening. As we visited each neighbor, goodhearted laughter accompanied suggestions to improve our performance and by the end of the evening, a pair of moaning ghosts danced around a sorceress as She chanted gibberish. Her seaworthy slave lumbered behind, dragging one foot, with the night’s tasty treats in an old seed sack slung over a humped shoulder. When we had finished our haunted tour, we danced in costume together in the House salon with only the light of the fireplace, our comical groans and shrieks sending our voices echoing about the halls in melodramatic song. We ended in the wee hours huddled snugly on the floor before the fire, sharing spiced hot cider and the hoard of treats.
The final laugh was on me, for the pigments Bainiel had chosen resisted all attempts to wash completely way. It was past Yule when the presence the Pirate Ghoul finally faded completely, and during that time my children named me ‘Deada’.
