A wealth of color for Halloween and fall

The blast of colors worn by hardwood trees in fall is what I miss most and yearn for from my former home state of Iowa. Red, brown, orange, yellow. I remember kicking through piles of multi-colored maple and oak leaves on the way to and from school. Sometimes I’d gather a handful of pretty five-pointed leaves like a bouquet. We’d press them between sheets of wax paper, but they’d eventually lose their brilliance. The colors, like all things seasonal, were a fleeting display.

The first hard frost often preceded an Iowan Halloween, transforming the previous glorious landscape to one of barren black limbed trees and brown lawns. Only the evergreens remained green, awaiting mantles of snow and Christmas lights to herald in the winter holidays.

Of course, traditionally, orange and black, and some yellow, comprised Halloween’s main color palette. In recent years purple has been added to this spectrum and took hold. Nice! I read an article recently about some purple pumpkins and various purple decorations also signaling awareness for seizure patients. Uhmmmm. I don’t think many people will distinguish this from the multitude of Halloween décor utilizing purple in their color schemes. Any distinction for that medical disorder’s cause is going to be lost on many Halloween partiers and parade-goers. The rest of the year, have at it. As an aside, purple is also the color associated with Alzheimer’s awareness. Their foundation’s annual fund-raising walk is coming up this month, too.  

Back to Halloween and its dazzling displays. Somewhere in the last couple decades, this autumn holiday went from a kids-candy-scavenging-costume-wearing-boo-palooza to a family-and/or-adult-helluva-party theme. Houses have incredible displays of lighting (orange and purple); lawns are littered with giant skeletons, witches, spiders and ghouls. Many of these are automatons stirring cauldrons, crawling out of graves, flying about on broomsticks. There’s spooky music augmented with howls and cackles emitting from hidden speakers. Families go trick-or-treating in shared costume themes. I’ve seen Marvel heroes, Harry Potter characters, Paw Patrol, Disney princesses and villains, as well as traditional spooks, zombies and, out here in Wyoming, cowboys on stuffed horses fitted around their waists. All so inventive.

The silliness of the holiday must be what started adults building their own party night around Halloween. Who can blame us? We are looking down the throat of an oncoming winter, cabin fever, Thanksgiving with its mammoth meal built around a family get-together with a ton of work involved for half an hour of gobbling, Christmas— also a mammoth meal– with its mountain of presents that load up credit cards and drain down finances already suffering to keep homes warm and lights on.

Yeah, us adults need a night of drinks and snacks representing dismembered body parts and fluids to lift our spirits. So, add garish neon greens (pus and bile), red (blood), pink (various organs), gray (brain matter) and black (dirt) for a well-laid out Halloween table. 

So many splendid colors, really almost the whole color wheel, can be employed during Halloween. But my favorite is those warm red, orange, yellow and brown leaves of an Iowan Indian summer. I really miss that. (This column was inspired by my wonderful coffee buddy. You’re welcome, my friend.)