A Night for Mercy

"Mercy and Halloween seem like a match made in heaven: treats, treats everywhere!” – Kate DiCamillo, in an afterward of Mercy Watson: Princess in Disguise

 It’s Halloween, and I’m thinking about candy.

 Growing up, my family didn't celebrate Halloween, mostly because of its many frightening traditions and also something about stranger danger, I think. We didn’t dress up, and my brother and I didn’t trick-or-treat.

Yet we were never deprived of candy.

 Candy was everywhere.

There was candy to purchase for the neighborhood families who showed up at our door. There was candy at the church fall festival and hay ride. And, of course, good Reformed Christians and homeschoolers we were, there was candy to be had for us all when we knocked on a more or less sturdy rendering of the castle church door of Wittengerg (after Dad, dressed up as Martin Luther, nailed a copy of  his 95 theses on it) on Reformation Day.

 Candy was a constant.

I vividly remember Halloween nights with a parade of neighbors coming to our door, all merry, all dressed up, all posing in front of our fireplace for my mom to take their picture. I remember the fathers’ deep laughter, the tired yet triumphant mothers who had made costumes, and our friends so eager to choose their candy as my brother and I exclaimed over their outfits.

I still think about all the good that happened around that candy. Like some kind of sacrament it was passed around to awkward homeschoolers and scrappy kids, prankster teens and distant parents, uniting us under porch lights and living rooms.

Fast forward a few years later. I’m a parent, and my kids don’t trick-or-treat for many of the same reason as when I grew up. But I still think about candy, and now also a pig named Mercy.

Mercy, if you don’t know her, is the porcine wonder of Kate DiCamillo' Mercy Watson series. Adopted  by Mr. and Mrs. Watson of Deckawoo Drive in a miraculous turn of events (told in her origin story A Piglet Named Mercy), Mercy leads the neighbors of that perfectly calm, perfectly normal, neighborhood on one wild adventure after another, fueled by her ravenous appetite for hot toast with a great deal of butter.

The stories, accompanied by the vivid vintage-style illustrations of Chris Van Dusen, are rollicking reads, like Chesterton novels in their buoyancy, joy, and chaos.

Most of the books in the series close their adventures with a scene of neighbors around a table raising glasses of orange juice over slices of buttered toast in a “toast” to Mercy (the visual and verbal puns throughout the stories are so lovely).

At the head of the table is always Mercy herself—plump, eager, and smiling.

Halloween is no less of an adventure for the treat-seeking pig. In Mercy Watson: Princess in Disguise, Mercy is coaxed by the Watsons into wearing an outrageous pink princess costume to trick-or-treat (parents of young children will empathize with the scene of frustrated Mrs. Watson trying to dress Mercy), but chaos ensues once she smells her favorite candy—Butter Barrels— and a knocked- over candy bowl and one grumpy cat means the whole neighborhood gets in on the chase (or is it a parade?), that ends with a visit from the fire department, a rescue, and, naturally, a party with buttered toast around the kitchen table.

Oh, it’s so wonderful! My five year old daughter is laughing. I am laughing, too, but with a catch in my heart. I look at the picture, read the neighbors’ conversation, and it is all so familiar to me. Not only of my childhood memories, but another party, another table I know:

 “You are in for a treat,” said Ned. “The toast here is excellent.”

“Eating food at a stranger’s house is potentially dangerous,” said Frank.

“But we are not strangers,” said Mrs. Watson. “We are your neighbors.”

“Mooooowwwwwwwwwllll,” said General Washington.

“Bah,” said Eugenia Lincoln, “who needs neighbors?”

“Oh, sister,” said Baby. “Here, have a Butter Barrel.” (67)

 I think it is a wonderful picture of God’s community; a bunch of unlikely strangers united by candy—treats, if you will— by broken bread, by extravagant mercy.

When I came across DiCamillo’s comment in the afterward I was struck by her simple observation, and she will forgive me if I read in an unintended allegory. Because, yes, of course, Mercy and Halloween are a match made in heaven! Isn’t this what God does? Even on a night intended for darkness, a scandalously generous God gives mercy like treats, treats like mercy, everywhere.

It is what He has always done.

So tonight my family will gather with neighbors under our porch lights.  We'll pass around candy, of course! and think about a certain porcine wonder. 

And in the darkness we'll raise a toast to  mercy.