Which Halloween witch is which?
For the past two years, I’ve been working on a book about witches, and during that whole time, I’ve kept a Halloween witch’s hat hanging on a closet knob in my study. More than just bad housekeeping, its presence represents a suite of questions that troubled me when my research began and that, despite all I’ve learned, still hasn’t been neatly settled. When we dress little girls in witch hats and capes on October 31, exactly what are we dressing them as? Do they somehow represent the witches who died, so long ago and so terribly, during the witch hunts? How could that darkness have turned into innocent fun? Might we inadvertently be mocking an old, but unforgotten, crime against women? These questions did not trouble me 10 years ago when my daughter was a child, and I tied this self-same witch’s hat under her warty chin. Instead, as I watched her make fearsome faces and show off her blackened teeth, I was reminded of how much I, too, had loved being a witch. For me, there had been real
