The last few Halloweens have been unusual ones. 2020 was the year when no one was outside at all, except a few friends who came and stood six feet away from our kids. No one went trick-or-treating, but played Dungeons and Dragons on Zoom with friends. But they made costumes anyway. Claudia (as Achilles), ended up on the cover of “Exellence Through Classics” magazine:
And Béla was a somewhat graceless but good-sport Trojan Horse — although he gave his costume to the cat as soon as he could.
2021 brought entirely new changes, in that while there were certainly more kids out trick-or-treating, my kids had made it to such an age, as did their friends, that their idea of what they were going to do with their evening did not really coalesce until it was actually happening. This resulted in me hounding them for weeks about what exactly it was that they were dressing up as (Claudia kept telling me “I have a vision” but never told me what the vision was, only that she would need money for it) and Béla, almost always the easier child, went with Shiang-Chi. Which was an easy forty bucks at the Disney store.
Did they trick-or-treat? It’s hard to say. They had candy when they came back. Tucker took a few pictures after the kids’ friends had gathered at our door (“Our house is the place where people meet up,” Claude had said to me, with a sort of mystified pride). And they looked like a little Breakfast Club of young teens, none of them in costumes of any easily recognizable disguise, and lounging in the paths of the servers for the outdoor tables of the bistro on our corner.
They must have gone to some houses for candy, but we then saw them in the ballfield, under the halogen lights, sitting in the bleachers — THE spot for “big kids” in this neighborhood.
Since they didn’t allow me to have that much fun with their costumes, and we didn’t want to go out dressed up ourselves, I had a concept– which Tucker did the bigger portion of carrying out. That is heroic of him, as he is in the middle of his PhD. I saw that I was heading towards the last of the making of Halloween costumes and being needed by my now-teenaged children for Halloween in general, so damnit, I needed scarecrows. Of Noel Fielding and Sandi Toksvig.
Obviously, we are big fans of Noel already. This was my birthday in 2021.
Noel is frequently the face of tranquility and grace in our house when we most need it. The way he goes over to the bakers who are in near tears on GBBS? He just has that sense that you need a gentle boost from him? It’s like that when you have a life-sized cardboard version of him in your house as well.
But I thought we should take it further.
Something went a little wonky with Sandi’s neck as we got them outside, and I wish i had gotten a better picture of Noel’s holographic purple five-inch platform boots (which used to be Claudia’s). But honestly, these were the hit of the neighborhood and people were stopping to photograph them often. Using the honor system by putting our candy in a soup pot, because we wanted a no-contact Halloween for ourselves (Béla would contract Omicron shortly after Christmas, but the rest of us stayed negative), was not entirely successful in that it was gone in ten minutes.
We also had “Squid Game” pumpkins, which not everybody got, but the people who did were appreciative.
Noel and Sandi had been supported by the base of a portable laptop desk, and when they were brought in their bodies were broken (but not ransacked). Their heads remain in our front window that does not have fig lanterns in it.
That brings us up to date on Things We’ve Made through 2021. Obviously, we would have liked to be together with Zach and others, and we do have some rough sketches of what we are going to do next out in the world, but are happier to report on a thing once we’ve done it than talk about it before. If anyone would like to borrow a large battery-operated LED fig lantern, or Noel Fielding or Sandi Toksvig’s head, or possibly even Achilles’ shield as described in detail in The Iliad, all those things are still here and we are happy to put them to community use. The Trojan Horse though — was totally destroyed by cats.
