Live Free: Here Lies Fear

My parents, Scott and Cheryl, ready for a costume party circa 1983.

You knew the neighborhoods that gave out the full-size candy bars. You fought with your mother over wearing a winter coat under your favorite costume. Your pillowcase weighed more than you did. Such was Halloween in New England for most of us lucky enough to run screaming through the streets for an annual trick or treat.  

I’m a millennial whose Halloween season started in September, devouring movies such as “Casper,” “The Addams Family,” “Hocus Pocus,” “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” and those I shouldn’t have at a young age, like “Halloween,” “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” and “The Thing.” Costumes, more often than not, were handmade by my mother, who preferred the more jovial side to Halloween — the well-planned costumes, pumpkin carving and decorating the front stoop. 

But like most everything, Halloween held a duality that stirred within me a childlike wonder to the light and dark sides to all things — in this case, the scarier side to Halloween. 

That’s where my father came into play.

My parents — both from Lowell, Mass. — started dating in their teens. And in pure Scott Andrews fashion, he brought my mother, Cheryl, to a cemetery on their first date. That was after going to see the classic werewolf movie “The Howling” at the drive-in.

On another date night, my parents went to Victorian Park in Salem, N.H. — a mini-golf/haunted house attraction that closed in the mid-2000s — where, at the end of the night, my mother was forced to balance on her high heels in a porta-potty as costumed ghouls rocked it from side to side chanting her name in low tones. My dad’s doing, of course. 

Such beginnings gave me a taste for the macabre. 

Growing up, I joined my brother, cousins and friends for the annual stroll down neighborhoods, ringing door bells for the promise of chocolate-y goodness. (Pretzel bags and apples were subsequently discarded. Nutrition had no authority on October 31.)

Even though my older cousin, Mark, traumatized a younger me while wearing a werewolf mask, he soon received the business end of my fairy princess wand — a victory I still pride myself on — and the scary side to Halloween was defeated.

I like to imagine that my father prepped me at a young age to deal with all types of monsters and ghosts. Maybe it was the way he got haunted house actors to break character and indulge him in mundane conversations, or perhaps it was how proud I was that the scary vampire with the evil laugh jumping out of a plywood coffin at my fellow karate mates was someone I knew. 

Now in my 30s, I look back at my Halloween memories with fondness. Between the lighthearted Halloween indulgences from my mother and the more twisted tales from my father, I found a home in the dual nature of Halloween. Now, I’m passing such memories to my nieces and nephew as they grow and experience their own Halloween escapades — my inner child runs alongside them from door to door.

Halloween could never be scary when the smile behind the vampire teeth is my dad’s, or when the laugh emanating from within the wolf’s mouth sounds like my older cousin. 

Terror is temporary; exchanging chocolate bars from skeleton hands to witchy claws is timeless.