Ghosts, skulls and pumpkins signaled the arrival of Halloween to the city as the sun set down Saturday evening on the last day of October. Valorie came home earlier and waved her magic wand to transform the front of our home into a trick-or-treater’s magnet, then we sat on the porch to greet kids, parents and grandparents from the neighborhood.

I read somewhere that the origin of Halloween comes from the well-known Celtic celebration Samhain, that means “summer end” and marks the end of the harvests season in Ireland. For old Celts, the door that separates this world with the one beyond opens with the arrival of the Samhain, allowing the spirits to pass through. The familiar ancestors were welcomed whereas the bad spirits were driven away with masks and costumes. With the passing of time, the Celts belief  was mixed with the Christian celebration of the Day of All the Saints, and thus Halloween was born.
Anyway as the night grew older it was time for the adults to party and celebrate so we headed for the Vintage Room on Magazine where a Halloween tango party took place. We enjoyed ourselves very much, dancing to our content to pretty good music, and staying to the Cumparsita set (for the tango impaired, this song signals the end of the evening and the moment when those who want to go home together seek each other for the last dance) knowing that in the witching hours of the night we would get an extra hour to rest our bones, an event popularly known as “fall back” and consisting of turning the clocks back to 1 am when the time strikes 2 am.
That’s what I wanted to talk about… It seems that the excitement of the evening (a.k.a. early vodka tonics and late pinot noirs) set a chain of events as I entered our living room which can be described as unload your sorry rear end on the couch and do a thorough inspection of the interior of your eyelids. Sometime later I opened my eyes, or not, I turned back the clocks or not, the thing is that as some part of me seemed to be tampering with time, the hands of all the clocks kept turning counterclockwise and somebody kept yelling, “play that funky music!”