I love Halloween.

There. I said it.

Not in the casual way people say they like Halloween because they enjoy pumpkin pie or because their children dress up once a year. I mean I genuinely, completely, unapologetically love Halloween. I love the whole ridiculous thing. I love the pumpkins and the skeletons and the ghosts hanging from trees. I love houses that look as though a family of vampires has moved in. I love walking outside when the air has finally turned cold enough to make you pull your sleeves over your hands. I love October so much that sometimes I wish I could slow the month down and keep it here for a while.

Where I live in America, Halloween begins long before October 31.

It starts when the first pumpkins appear outside the grocery store.

I notice them immediately.

They sit in enormous wooden bins, hundreds of them, all different shapes and colors, and I always stop to look. Some are perfectly round and orange. Some are pale. Some are green. Some are enormous and lumpy and look as if they have been growing underground while plotting something. I don’t need a pumpkin. I never really need a pumpkin. That has nothing to do with it.

I want one because it is October.

Then the houses begin.

At first, someone puts out a skeleton.

A week later, the skeleton has acquired a friend.

Then there is a ghost.

Then another skeleton.

Then suddenly the house across the street has become a full-scale haunted attraction, and I am standing on the sidewalk thinking, Yes. Exactly. More.

I love the houses that go too far.

The ones with fake graves in the front yard. The ones with enormous spiders crawling over the roof. The ones where a skeleton is sitting in a chair on the porch as though it has been waiting all year for someone to come over. I love the little details, too: a tiny ghost hanging from a tree, a pumpkin with a crooked face, a light glowing in an upstairs window.

I notice everything.

Perhaps that is why Halloween suits me.

I notice things other people walk past.

A house with one window lit purple.

A black cat sitting beneath a porch.

Leaves caught in the corner of a driveway.

A child’s costume that is already falling apart before the evening has properly begun.

The smell of wood smoke somewhere behind the houses.

The sound of someone laughing in the dark.

By Halloween night, I am completely happy.

The cold doesn’t bother me. In fact, I like it. I like putting on a coat and going outside when the sidewalks are covered with leaves and every porch seems to have a different personality. Some houses are elegant. Some are terrifying. Some have obviously been decorated by someone who spent three hundred dollars on inflatable ghosts and has absolutely no regrets.

I understand those people.

I might be one of them.

The children come first.

They always do.

You hear them before you see them: little voices shouting down the street, parents calling after them, feet running over the pavement. A tiny witch knocks on a door. A superhero nearly falls down the steps. A dinosaur the size of a refrigerator walks past carrying a plastic pumpkin.

And then the door opens.

“Trick or treat!”

“Happy Halloween!”

Candy goes into the bucket.

The children run away.

Another door opens.

Another costume.

Another handful of candy.

Another little piece of October.

Later, the teenagers appear. They are older and much too cool to admit that they are having fun. Some wear elaborate costumes. Others have clearly put them together ten minutes before leaving the house. They walk in groups, laughing and taking pictures, pretending they aren’t excited when somebody’s front yard suddenly makes a noise behind them.

I watch all of it.

And I think about how strange it is that something I love so much is also something I learned about in a place far away from where I live now.

Halloween belongs completely to America, and yet when I think about it, I don’t feel far from home.

Maybe because I have learned that you can have more than one idea of home.

You can miss one place while loving another.

You can carry one country inside you while standing in the middle of another.

And sometimes the two places meet in unexpected ways.

For me, they meet in October.

I think there is something especially beautiful about being alive in a season that is constantly reminding you that everything changes. The trees turn red and gold and let go of their leaves. The afternoons become shorter. The air gets colder. Darkness arrives earlier.

And instead of pretending we don’t notice, we decorate for it.

We carve faces into pumpkins.

We hang ghosts from trees.

We put skeletons in our yards.

We dress our children as monsters and send them into the darkness with bags full of candy.

I love that.

Maybe that is the real reason I love Halloween.

It takes everything that might frighten us—the darkness, the ghosts, the things hiding in the shadows—and turns it into something we can laugh about together.

So if you ever come to America in October, don’t just look at Halloween from a distance.

Come outside.

Walk through a neighborhood after dark.

Listen for the doorbells.

Watch the children run from house to house.

Look at the ridiculous skeleton sitting in somebody’s front yard.

Notice the pumpkins.

Notice the leaves.

Notice the lights.

And if you happen to see a woman standing on her porch, smiling at all of it a little too happily, there’s a good chance it is me.

I will probably have a pumpkin beside me.

I will definitely have Halloween decorations.

And I will almost certainly be thinking the same thing I think every October:

I wish this month would never end.

Milanka Šulejić
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