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Wow, between the decorations and the scary movies filling the airwaves (can you still call them airwaves when most people get their TV programing through cable or fiber optics?), you know Halloween is upon us.  If you’ve already eaten your Halloween candy this is your warning to go out and get more and don’t eat it all this time.  Our little masked goblins will be upon us in just 1 week.  I’ve already bought my Halloween candy twice and the caldron is currently empty except for a handful of Hersey’s kisses no one wants.

Of course, following on the heels of Halloween, is Thanksgiving and the kids have already begun asking for their favorites (green bean casserole and stuffing) and planning our strategy for Black Friday, although most of our serious shopping occurs on Cyber Monday.  We all know Thanksgiving is just a little vacation giving you time (and carbo loading) to begin preparations for Christmas in earnest.  I’ve already seen retailers advertising for Christmas and who can blame them after the disastrous year they’ve had.

So, here’s my Halloween post for you.

Yesterday, we drove into the Blue Ridge to see the leaves — of course we knew this was a rouse to visit the wineries between DC and the mountains, but we lied to ourselves that we went to view the fall colors and even took the dogs as co-conspirators.

As we drove the back roads, we encountered several small family cemeteries reminding me of how we used to scare the bejesus out of my younger brother and sister with the tales we made up about a small cemetery near my aunt’s house on the Florida panhandle.  We later discovered this was an old slave cemetery that eventually gave up it’s ghosts to the swamp during a particularly wet season.  I don’t think anyone remembered it was there except us kids.

I wish we’d known they were slaves — we could have scared my siblings even more with tales of slaves revenging themselves on decendents of their former masters.  Even though our family didn’t arrive until the early 1900′s my siblings didn’t know history well enough to know we arrived too late to own slaves.  Plus, I never knew Jews to own slaves — they were much more likely to be on the other side of that commercial exchange.

Mary Posie was a particular favorite in constructing horrific tales to torment our younger siblings.  I apologize to her family, if they ever read this, but we conceived her as a mass murderess who was hung from a nearby tree by the townspeople for her crimes — including the murder of several children found playing in the area.

It got to the point that, whenever we wanted something from our siblings, we’d warn that Mary Posie would come get them if they didn’t comply.  It worked pretty effectively until they were teenagers and was always good to insure our secrets were safe — secrets such as stealing an extra piece of cake or sneaking out to visit friends.

Ah, good times.

Anyone care to add their own scary tale? Put it in the comments.  Or, expand on our story of Mary Posie.