A Pirate That Quacks Like a Duck

September 26, 2012

Halloween was never marked on the calendar as a favorite holiday amongst my family.  Instead of dressing up for Halloween as a goblin, monster, or some other ugly beast, I usually dressed up in some watered down costume that preserved the old lie adage that girls are sugar and spice and everything nice.  I was once a snaggletooth Tina Turner and at another point a California raisin. Tell me I wasn’t cool.

Our Halloween tradition included us – by us I’m referring to the majority of my 14 first cousins – being hauled to a church “holiday celebration” or fighting at home over the bags of candy my aunt and grandmother would bring us.

As I type this, my initial thought of posting about how Halloween wasn’t much fun for me until I had my daughter to dress up and laugh at with, has been completely derailed by old fall memories.  Later for my daughter quacking like a duck  although she was clearly a pirate and was prompted to grunt, arrrghhh!  Hence, the title of the post.

So often we type or text, “LOL,” but at this very moment I am literally laughing out loud thinking of the fall seasons when my cousins and I would sit around my grandmother’s kitchen table that was decorated with a vinyl never-quite-season-appropriate tablecloth playing a made up game of “clucking” (the sound the tongue makes when it’s thrusted onto the hard palette of the mouth) or, our favorite Halloween past time: Bingo, the Avery kids edition.

We would take our respective places around Moma’s kitchen table, sliding her “good” chairs from the dining room to the kitchen table to make room for all of my older cousins to sit.  Us younger ones (yes, I am amongst the younger, cuter half of the cousins) would sometimes sit on the lap of one of the older cousins with a large-print Bingo sheet in hand and the aroma of pumpkin seeds and salt and my aunts birthday cake wafting from Moma’s oven.  What established our game of Bingo as “the Avery kids edition” was that we gambled our Halloween candy!!!  Winner takes all.

Pause.

Here’s where I take a break from typing so that I may roar in laughter. (Out loud.)  Feel free to join in at the thought of a bunch of kids ages 7 – 14 gambling at our grandmothers Valentines Day decorated tablecloth on Halloween.

We gambled Butterfingers, Snickers, Jolly Ranchers, Starburst, and when we got really desperate, pennies.  What a group of rascals we were.  We may not have created a fall tradition that included going door to door Trick-or-Treating, but when there’s a group of kids as hilarious and rambunctious as we were who needs Trick-or-Treating?  Every day growing up with my cousins was a treat.  Sometimes a trick, I admit, but even that turned out to be a treat.

I didn’t realize it before today, but fall is a reminder that I need to call my cousins.  Muah Avery bunch!!!

 

 

Written by bequoted Posted in Be a Kid Tagged with Fall, Family, Halloween, Pumpkin