Autumn Time

Woe is me. Dallas only has two seasons: the inferno and fallish/winterish. I love autumn time and feel completely gypped that I don’t get to enjoy it in its true and colorful condition.

My enthusiasm for the fall is so intense that I am naming my daughter Kianna Autumn. Well, the “Kianna” is still in question, but “Autumn” is non-negotiable. To me, autumn means beauty, gratitude and celebration. So will be my daughter.

My favorite part about fall is the smells. The air is crisp and delicious. Pumpkin carving, turkey roasting, birthday cake, rotting leaves… they all have the aroma of orange, rust, and chocolate-brown swirling around in a steamy mug of hallelujah.

Even Trick-or-Treat candy smells better than regular candy. All of the candies’ odors stew together in the pillowcase so that the Snickers smell like the Skittles, which smell like the Tootsie Rolls, which smell like the Nerds, which smell like the Bit-O-Honeys, which all smell like the people’s houses from which they came—which, strangely, isn’t a bad thing.

And how I love Halloween. So does Ryan. At his house Halloween was a BIG deal. After trick-or-treating, the family would stay up all night and watch horror movies, while inhaling thousands of calories of candy. The next day, the parents would call the kids in sick from school so they could sleep off their sugar-hangovers.

Ryan and I plan on carrying out the Halloween Extravaganza tradition in our family. We have already started our horror movie marathon. This is the first year I have been up for scary movies since “The Grudge incident” of 2005. I recall having Ryan follow me around the apartment for a week because I was too afraid to be in a room all by myself (bathroom included).

I purchased Doug’s costume today; a lion. He’d better stay awake for trick-or-treating this year because I HAVE TO HAVE Halloween candy. Last year, Doug was a BYU football player and had rubbed all of his makeup off before kick-off. So tired.

Actually, last Halloween was a failure as a whole. We had our first house—which meant our first trick-or-treaters—so I bought out the whole candy isle at Walmart. Sadly, our door bell only rang twice that night and all of the trick-or-treaters were over the age of sixteen and dressed as pimps and hookers (or princesses and pirates. So hard to tell the difference nowadays).

To add injury to insult, two of the trick-or-treaters were women well over forty, who, when offered their choice of candy, took literally handfuls out of the bowl. While I had plenty of candy to spare, the whole concept left me totally miffed. They had desecrated Halloween.