A Halloween miracle
I am a praying woman. I always have been, and forever will be. Sometimes I feel like I have a direct line to heaven, and sometimes I feel like it’s been put on the “Do Not Call” list, but I’m always praying about something, big or small.
And two days before Halloween a few years ago, I was in the middle of a Goodwill store, praying HARD. Let me explain.
I am good at a lot of things, but dressing my kids up for Halloween is not one of them. Earlier this month, my husband told me that he’d been deflecting questions from his coworkers for weeks, asking what his kids are going to be for Halloween.
“I don’t know what to tell them,” he said. “Is this information I should know?”
“Just tell them your kids are dressing up as whatever they happen to find in our costume box 20 minutes before they leave for trick-or-treating,” I responded.
This is really not much of an exaggeration. Some parents plan for weeks, crafting the perfect family-themed Halloween costumes, like Dorothy, the lion, the tin man and Toto; the cast of Ghostbusters; or all the condiments that can be found on a table in a Chinese restaurant.
This kind of coordination is simply not in my wheelhouse.
Even when I’m trying, my costume attempts are failures. Take, for example, my oldest daughter’s costume of 2007. My big plan was for her to dress up as a bag of jellybeans, which is a costume I’ve coveted from the moment I saw it at a Girl Scout Halloween party in 1986. Unfortunately, I procrastinated so long that by the time Halloween loomed, I had absolutely no components of the costume figured out. What I eventually came up with is this: a clear trash bag with arm and leg cut outs, filled with balloons, the bag taped closed around Lucy’s neck, and a handwritten “Jelly Beans” sign slapped on the front. Even with the sign, people were stopping her as she went trick-or-treating, asking "What are you, little girl? Oh, a bag of balloons?" It was embarrassing.
Which brings me to my desperate praying incident in Goodwill. Halloween was mere days away, and while my older kids had managed to scrape together costumes they were satisfied with, I had really dropped the ball with four-year-old Emmett. His one wish was to be a superhero, but the only thing I could dig up from our costume box was a torn Power Ranger suit and ratty Superman cape.
He was not impressed. I felt terrible; shouldn’t every kid be ecstatic about their Halloween costume? My day was absolutely packed with to-do’s, and hitting up the thrift store to look for a costume was not something I wanted to add in, but I decided to give it a try. Leaving Logan with the other kids, I took along baby Hyrum and raced through my errands, finally ending up at Goodwill.
About two minutes into my search, Hyrum became an absolute terror, wiggling out of the cart, screaming, and refusing to sit. I was frantically walking up and down the two aisles of random costumes searching for ANYTHING that Emmett would think was cool, but there was nothing to be found. So here I was searching, wrestling Hyrum, sweating bullets and totally regretting bringing a baby along, when finally I uttered a quick prayer in my mind: “Lord, if I’m going to find something for Emmett, it has to be NOW, because I can’t manage this baby any longer.” Less than a minute later, I looked down on the ground and saw a Green Lantern (a verycool superhero) costume just lying there—right size, right price, right everything. I brought it home and Emmett’s face absolutely lit up.
So there you have it: it takes an actual miracle for me to properly costume my children. Heaven help us all this coming Thursday. So far, I’m the only one with my costume all ready, because I wear the same thing every year: I’ll be dressed as a tired mom.