I’ve always had an ambivalent relationship with holidays and tradition. I feel alienated by American holidays like the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving. I suppose my family had some cultural attachment to Christmas and even observed midnight mass when I was a kid. But given that colonialism was the main reason that parts of my family ended up Catholic in the first place, it’s perhaps no surprise that the ritual faded away over the years, giving way to an entirely secular day of food and gifts: delightful enough, but also not unlike our other family gatherings.
Chinese holidays like Lunar New Year and Mid-Autumn Festival were a bigger deal, but it’s hard to maintain their traditions when you’re not given the day off for them, when the suburbs you grew up in prohibit firecrackers, and when the American-born generation lacks the language and culinary skills needed to really make the holidays come alive.
Halloween was one of those holidays that was entirely foreign to my parents; if it weren’t for me and my brother, we wouldn’t have observed it. So it is truly odd that I’ve come to love Halloween to a point of devoting an entire month to it, thanks to the birth of my son and inspired by a friend’s growing family tradition to celebrate 31 Days of Halloween.
Where it all began
My friends had done it for seven years with their two daughters and, when my son Theo was born, requested that I carry the torch. I don’t know if 31 Days of Halloween was something that they invented or if they got the idea from someone else, but the challenge is simply this: Dress your kid in a different costume for each day of the month of October and take a picture. The costumes should be DIY, put together with things you already have. As a big fan of Halloween and cosplay in general, I gleefully gave the challenge a try. I did it for shits and giggles at first, as if I were jumping on a Tik Tok challenge that would never go viral. But this year marked my third run of 31 Days of Halloween, so it’s arguably become a tradition in my house, where photo collages of each series hang proudly in the hallways.
I loved watching my friends put together their 31 costumes every year. They were always simple and wonderfully creative: smearing ketchup on the kid to have her dressed as Carrie from the Stephen King movie, combing her hair over her face and dressing her in a white nightgown like the ghost from The Ring, wearing daddy’s thick-rimmed glasses to resemble Ira Glass, using a paper doily as a collar in tribute to Ruth Bader Ginsberg. So when I did my first run of 31 Days of Halloween, I also thought about what would showcase films I loved, pop culture I was absorbing at the moment, people I wanted to honor, in addition to what would just be really cute. That year, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had recently appeared at the Met Gala in a white dress with “TAX THE RICH” emblazoned in red, so I sacrificed one of Theo’s onesies to give a nod to that.
I knew I had to reference my favorite childhood movie, The Sound of Music, especially since this was my first year that I wasn’t going to be observing my annual holiday tradition of attending the Sound of Music Singalong and costume contest at San Francisco’s Castro Theater.
Inspired by netizens who were recreating pieces of art while sheltering in place during the pandemic, I did my take on René Magritte’s “Son of Man.”
Indeed, this started out as an entirely narcissistic exercise about me displaying my baby and my cleverness on social media and taking delight in the “likes” and comments from my friends. But it quickly became a learning exercise and a lifeline of sorts during a particularly exhausting time of my life. My husband and I were trying to buy a house; we put my condo on the market, moved to an apartment we were temporarily renting from my aunt, and relied on a patchwork of family to help us with childcare while I had to return to teaching high school full-time and in person. It was also my first time coming back to campus as a new mother. I had to drive an hour to my job, teach all day and pump during my breaks, commute back, spend dinner with my family, and then nurse Theo through the night. I’ve never been one to tolerate sleep deprivation well, and this hectic daily routine eventually landed me in urgent care when I collapsed at work one day in late September.
Counterintuitively, adding this daunting challenge of creating 31 costumes actually set a more sustainable rhythm for my month of October. There was something therapeutic about punctuating each day with a moment to pause, exercise creativity, and take delight in something silly. I would go to bed each night excited about executing the next day’s costume. And in the way that Marie Kondo-ing all my belongings prior to our move had prompted me to reflect on my relationship with objects, I also had to work with what I had in our temporary domicile to create this little bit of daily joy. I triumphed in repurposing the skirt from the Snow White costume that I made before Theo was born for our version of Gustav Klimt’s “The Kiss” and Rihanna’s outfit from the 2015 Met Gala (which was a challenge my fashionista brother posed in response to the AOC Met Gala getup).
And because I was performing this challenge while I was having daily contact with relatives who were helping us during this transitional time, many of the costumes involved their participation. While at my aunt’s house, I had to borrow a pot and some yarn to turn Theo into a (reluctant) pot of spaghetti.
This series serves as documentation of a foundational year in my life, a reminder of my entry into motherhood, of how hard my husband and I worked to acquire a dream home for our son, of how loved and supported we are by our family. Fittingly, our second year doing 31 Days of Halloween featured our first holiday season in our new home.
The second year
To showcase our home, I gleefully chose our family costume for Halloween day an ensemble from the movie Coco to match the Día de los Muertos theme of our outdoor decorations.
My husband and I often marvel at the childhood that we are giving our son in comparison to our own, as children of immigrants. My mother, even when she didn’t understand the things that delighted me and my brother, always indulged us, and often made our Halloween costumes from scratch. Still, even in creating joy for us, I always sensed acutely her sadness: the sadness of a daughter who served her mother without question, who never wanted to come to this country, who projected her own dreams onto her children. Her mother was an expert seamstress, likely out of necessity rather than leisure, and made my Communion dress and Catholic school uniforms.
When I sew, I am both honoring and resisting my inheritance, practicing a skill that was passed down to me, but using it for utter frivolity rather than survival. I would like to think that my foremothers would approve of my devoting time each day to play dress-up and frolic with my kid precisely because they couldn’t afford to do the same. Or perhaps they would shake their heads and judge me for not doing something more productive or making more money, especially given my life of privilege. I honestly don’t know.
When I see my grandmother’s portrait on our family altar, I am struck by how old she looked, though she was only in her sixties when she died. My mother has called herself “old” for as long as I can remember, though she was only thirty when I was born. I became a mom at forty, a “geriatric mother” in those awful medical terms, and that is perhaps why I insist on a life of youthful exuberance. I want to fill Theo’s childhood, and by extension my motherhood, with magic and giddiness.
This year
In this third year of 31 Days of Halloween, another magic of the ritual has emerged: My newfound friends have joined me in it, and in the process, have become my community. Playdates have turned into group costumes, creating memories that we will cherish for years to come. During one low-key gathering, we had our kids reenact Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle (with Theo as Neil Patrick Harris). As we watched our two-year-olds wreak havoc in my friends’ Tesla, we shared an uninhibited, cathartic laughter that seems so rare in our day-to-day life. As millennial parents raising children in a world in which school shootings, economic collapse, environmental catastrophe, and genocide are increasingly normalized, we have bonded over our shared anger, fear, and fatigue. But in that brief moment of hilarity, we were able to just remember the optimism that we had when we were younger and hope that our kids will grow up in a world where adventurous shenanigans are still possible. I am grateful to be in community as I fight for that world for Theo.
In another spontaneous gathering, I met with a group of mom friends at a park. We dressed our kids up as bugs; Theo requested to be a spider. While we were watching our kids flutter around, one mom whom I was just getting to know, a brave and vivacious woman who has been battling cancer for the past year, shared with me that when she was pregnant with her daughter, she had a vivid dream about a rare and beautiful butterfly. She tried looking up this butterfly, but never found it. It only occurred to her as she was photographing her daughter, whom she dressed as a butterfly for this playdate, that this day was her dream realized. I don’t know if she would have shared this intimate part of her life had it not been for her joining me for this otherwise uneventful day in October.
A tradition is only one so long as it is practiced, and should Theo refuse to participate, that might be the end of 31 Days of Halloween for my household. Even so, I’d like to think that I’ve planted a seed of whimsy and imagination that he will nurture for the rest of his life, and that he will know to conjure this spirit when he needs it. My husband didn’t grow up observing Día de los Muertos; he says his mother, who fled her family at the age of fifteen, had conflicted feelings about honoring the dead. But this year, the day after Halloween, he set up an ofrenda that spanned our dining room table, even crafting some of the decorations himself. My mother-in-law placed photos of her grandparents, which was the first time that I had ever heard her mention them. Perhaps she was doing this for Theo, who will now know a little bit more about his ancestors. But I’d like to think that in reviving a tradition that was lost, she was able to offer herself a little bit of healing as well.
As I write this, I am preparing for another Thanksgiving and Christmas. Amidst the stress of meal planning, hosting, and gift buying, I try to take some time to do nothing but just play. Just yesterday, when Theo and I were watching The Nightmare Before Christmas, he pointed to the screen and said, “Mama, I want to dress up like Jack Skellington.” May my reply always be, “Yes, let’s make that happen.”
[All images and permissions courtesy of Catherine Fung]
