I received a short prompt in the Happier app to give me a little boost today, and here it is: Spend five minutes thinking about the scents associated with your favorite holiday.
First, it was fun to even think of which holiday I could do. Easter – the smell of chocolate, the dusty smell of the paper colored Easter grass we reuse every year, jelly beans. Or maybe Christmas – cloves, oranges, cinnamon, peppermint. But it said your favorite holiday – and mine is Halloween.
Here are the smells of my childhood Halloweens: First up is greasepaint. The thick, sticky stuff that never dries up and gets all over everything – under your fingernails from when you forget about the makeup and scratch an itch on your nose, all over the costume, even on the car seats. There was dark green for a witch, black and white for a skeleton, white cheeks and red drops of blood for a vampire. A pirate would get a stubbly beard, a zombie would get mashed up saltines mixed with gray paint and spirit glued to the cheeks (pretty convincing rotting flesh!), and a Frankenstein’s monster would have a squared off giant head made of a gallon milk jug, green face, gray spray painted corks spirit glued to the neck. We went all-in on the homemade costumes back in my youth – and they always had to be scary or scary-adjacent. My father had four daughters and not a one of us was ever a fairy or princess or anything sweet or darling at Halloween – we were always monsters.
Second is the musty, mildly mildew smell of the costumes that came out of the costume box once a year. Most of the costumes had to serve multiple purposes – a black robe could be a witch’s dress, a vampire’s cape, Death’s shroud, or get swaddled creatively around a pirate’s waist and tied with gold cord. We had various scarves and ribbons and ropes and pieces of black polyester cloth that were draped and pinned as necessary each year. Fake earrings, giant plastic necklaces – the whole bunch was stored in a cardboard box in a closet all year and pulled out, aired out, and worn that one magic night.
Third is hairspray. We girls generally had our hair teased, sometimes spray painted a color, and hair-sprayed within an inch of its life to be a ratty witch or disgusting zombie. We were not a family that did hair in the morning before school – a quick brush and off you go – so hairspray was generally confined to Halloween time. The smell of the giant aerosal metal can of Aqua Net always reminds me of those hours standing in front of my mother, wincing and whining as she roughly back-combed my hair and sprayed until I had the sticky taste and smell all in my mouth and sinuses.
Fourth is the smell (and taste) of fake blood. Our father would make us put fake blood waxy capsules in our mouth and bite down, so it would run down our chin and cheeks convincingly. We kids were generally all-in on Halloween, up for just about anything, but man we hated this. It did not taste like much except wax, but the consistency was so horrible – just sludgy gross thick red blech rolling around in your teeth and then dripping down your chin. Yuck.
Last – the smell of the candy. We would generally come home at the end of the night and the five of us would sit in a circle on the floor, dump out our bags, and sort and trade. I love to categorize and I would line up big chocolate bars, smaller chocolate bars, tootsie pops, other lollipops, those little boxed candies of Boston Baked Beans, tooth-destroying Mary Janes. We would wheel and deal with each other a bit, then carefully bundle it all up back into our own bags and hoard it until my mother dumped it all together in a giant glass apothecary jar on top of the fridge, that had formerly held pretzel sticks. Usually by the time we got to that point, the only things left were off brand tootsie rolls, Necco wafers, waxy root beer bottles, and other things none of us much liked. She would parcel it all out in our lunchboxes each day as a treat til it was all gone.
My Halloweens now with my kids are just as special, though different. We tend to do matching clever costumes rather than scary ones, and I often don’t fool with the greasepaint. The nostalgia for me comes with the smells of Halloween in my family of origin – three sisters, one brother, a cardboard box of polyester swaths of fabric, lots of stage makeup, and the thrill of child anticipation that seems so impossible to ever capture again as an adult.
