Didn’t I Feed You Yesterday?

out.”

“I’ll be right back,” he says, conceding the point. Our condition can only be accurately described as too much togetherness, or overwhelming Christmas spirit.

When Peter returns a couple of hours later, he’s brought me a surprise, entering the house loaded down with Kmart bags.

“Now, that’s what I’m talking about!” I say, taking the bags from him and peeking inside. We have an annual tradition of buying up all the reduced-price gaudy ornaments that Kmart has to offer.

“Look at these.” Peter pulls a box of large round red ones with flocked snowmen on them.

“Fantastic,” I say. “Let’s hang them up!”

He grabs a couple more boxes and walks out the kitchen door, while I race down the hall to the gun cabinet to retrieve my personal favorite, a high-powered German pellet rifle, and a box of ammo. I run back into the kitchen and open the window over the sink. By the time I get my rifle loaded, Peter has hung about twenty odd-size ornaments fifty yards away on a nail-studded plank designed for this purpose.

“All clear!” he yells, running back to the house to join me. I can’t tell you how many houseguests have enjoyed this activity. Even the kids get into the action with assorted BB guns. Before you know it, every window on the north side of the house is open and tiny Santas and reindeer are being blown to smithereens. When the last one has been dispatched, Peter turns to me, my very own Mr. Smith & Wesson, gun still slightly smoking.

“Good work keeping the kids alive,” he says, and gives me a high-five.

Just barely alive. Little did he know that while he was out, the four elder boys went a little stir crazy; in their moment of severe cabin fever, they decided to collect all the cardboard boxes from the various presents and construct a giant fort in the kitchen. I was getting Finn up from his nap when I heard yelling from downstairs.

“Fire in the hole!” Pierson shouted, and though I know he is prone to drama, I raced back down, a half-naked Finn on my hip. Smoke curled out of the kitchen and I got there just in time to see Peik throwing water on a black chunk of cardboard and Truman slapping the same area with a wet dish-towel. Pierson stood in the corner, fire extinguisher sort of at the ready. Though, like his mother before him, he didn’t have the sense to actually point and shoot.

“Who set this on fire?” I demanded. They all just stood there, a tableau de Noel,

“It wasn’t me!” cried Pierson.

“Spontaneous combustion?” Peik managed. They all looked at him, nodding in agreement, and then looked back at me, praying for believability.

“I have read Ripley’s Believe It or Not,” I said, looking each of them dead in the eye. “And I know for certain that spontaneous combustion only happens in obscure English villages. You’re all guilty, but I’m going to turn my back and the ringleader can put his matches on the table.” When I turned around there was a box for each boy. Perhaps I should have tried to teach them something while I had them, after all. Like, “Let your brother take the fall,” or “Don’t play with matches.” I really felt sorry for them in that moment. What they really needed was to be back in school. Fast. By the time the holidays were officially over, every last one of us was happy to see the last of the others.

SINCE I MOVED TO THE NORTHEAST, I’M NOT REALLY THAT INTO Easter. I generally try to avoid it altogether. In my opinion, Easter should look very springy, and when the temperature is thirty-seven degrees and my kids are running around in fleece instead of pristine white embroidered short sets, it just doesn’t feel right. My kids know that they have a day off from school, but they don’t seem completely clear on the difference between Easter and Passover, though they’re aware that we aren’t Jewish. I can usually avoid having to fill baskets on Easter by just not mentioning that it is Easter Sunday. This only works if I can prevent the kids from noticing that It’s the Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown is on and if I can keep them away from the Peeps display at Rite Aid. Otherwise, I’m busted and have to search the basement for baskets and scrounge the kitchen for candy.

Halloween is the big holiday in our family. It’s the perfect example of how a low-expectation event can blow away the most jaded partygoer if you put in extra effort and preparation. We have amassed a cache of Hollywood- prop-room-worthy decorations and begin putting them up around October 1. Enter our loft on any day thereafter, and you are likely to find me on a ladder, hand-sewing formations of life-size rubber bats to the sprinkler pipes that run along the ceiling, or strategically placing rotting rubber corpses.

For some reason, my boys have no interest in my design talents and want to wear store-bought costumes, but my own is carefully crafted. I wear an iteration of the same theme every year: the mad scientist’s creature. One look at Peter should tell you who plays the mad scientist. All we need to do for him is throw a lab coat over whatever he happens to be wearing on October 31, tease his locks up a little bit higher, and voila! The execution of my getup is slightly more complicated, as it requires three main components: an elaborate wig, a latex dress, and a pair of freaky white contacts.

I care so deeply about this particular holiday that a few years ago I had myself fitted for top-grade, straight- out-of-a-horror-movie zombie eyes. These lenses white out my irises completely, except for a small black spot in the center to see through. Their design is very clever—imagine a white doughnut painted on a contact lens—and the effect is ultra creepy. I can see perfectly with them in, and they are comfortable, but I have one problem: I cannot get them either in or out by myself. For all the gory and disgusting things I can put up with around me for this occasion—the fake blood, the bowl of “intestines,” and so on—I am grossed out to the point of fainting by the idea of my finger making contact with my eye. This year I went upstairs to my neighbor’s apartment and she slipped them in, amid much blinking and tearing, but clearly I couldn’t go see her at one A.M. to ask her to take them out. I slept in them and tried to get them out by myself the next morning, to no avail. Peter is equally as eyeball averse as I am, so I needed to find someone less squeamish.

“Mom, really, I’ll make my own breakfast,” Truman said as he bumped into me in the kitchen. “I can’t look at you.”

“Truman, do Mommy a favor and help her get these things out?” I pleaded. “I have a meeting in an hour, and I can’t show up like this.” I rolled my eyes for effect. He backed away, forgoing food and practically running for the door.

I would have asked his older brother, but one look at Peik’s nails after a night of partying suggested otherwise. I finally tracked down Peter. Not only had I run out of boys, but also, I figured they’d had enough of me and my costume needs after the annual get-Mom-into-her-latex-dress event the afternoon before.

Many people have a favorite Thanksgiving dish; for me it wouldn’t be Halloween without latex. My dress this year was black, knee length, and backless, with long sleeves and buckles at the neck and waist. I bought it at a fetish shop in the East Village, one of the last New York neighborhoods that hasn’t been sanitized of its sex shops.

Wearing latex is quite ritualistic, and latex garments are difficult to get into. First, you cover your body with baby powder, sprinkling the inside of the garment as well. Then you step into the dress and sort of roll it up—hoping to align it properly, because it is nearly impossible to reposition once on. Once you’re dressed, there is baby powder everywhere and polishing to be done. The boys, each equipped with a handful of silicone gel, rub me down until I shine like a brand-new sex toy in a Times Square window (before Disney, that is). I can only wonder what lasting effects this activity will have on their sexuality, but I figure they will end up in therapy for some reason, so why not make life interesting for their eventual shrinks? You spend that kind of money, someone better be entertained.

Halloween starts about an hour after I don the giant albino Afro wig and six-inch Jimmy Choos. I now clear seven feet easily. As long as I don’t drink, I won’t need to pee. Mayhem breaks out at about five, when packs of kids large to small arrive. The undead fill our loft to the rafters, and even those who dare to show up without costumes take on an eerie glow in the strobe lights and artificial fog. Kids eat way too much candy, and adults drink way too much liquor, as evidenced by the inevitable “Thriller” dance performed by the entire crowd.

This year Peter and I broke free around nine, leaving the kick-out and cleanup to Nicole and Alicia, much stricter and more capable enforcers than we’ll ever be. I was quite excited to be invited to a fancy party to benefit Central Park. I have to say my husband and I really stood out in a sea of Sarah Palins: Sarah and John, Sarah and Bristol, Sarah and Moose, Sarah as beauty queen, and countless pigs in lipstick. I had carefully placed a top hat on my ’fro, making me pretty much the tallest dominatrix in the place, as well as the shiniest. Peter led me around the venue, in all my fabulousness, and still the only comment I heard repeatedly was “Do you think that’s his real