Every October my sons begin making their plans for Halloween. I eavesdrop from the driver's seat to their discussions, to the planning board meetings held in the back of our mini-van.

"Okay," says my 10-year-old, "how about this year, we have screaming spiders that drop down on top of people from the trees?"

"Good idea," concurs my 14-year-old, "but let's talk about the dummy."

"Yeah," shouts the 4-year-old, "let's make it all bloody!"

Every year, my husband and sons rake up all the leaves in the front yard and, rather than putting them in brown bags to be picked up curbside, stuff them into an old flannel shirt and my husband's work pants, making a bulgy approximation of a man flat on his back in the middle of our front yard. They then pull out the 'Halloween box' from the basement, a dusty, sticky assortment of leftover costumes, horrible rubber masks, fake fur, fake fangs, and fake blood, tubes of green monster makeup, a plastic four-foot tall skeleton, spider webs with suction cups that stick to the living room windows, a 'Scary Sound Effects' CD, and a ball of white gauzy synthetic cobwebs with last year's leaves still caught in it. The boys dig out a mask and a wig to make the dummy's head and stick some hiking boots on the end of its legs.

With my husband's help - okay, under his expert and enthusiastic leadership - each year they create a "scene" involving the dummy. It usually features lots of fake blood and suggests, they hope, that something terribly violent has taken place on our suburban front lawn.

I am the mother. It is my job to keep them physically safe and morally safe. Therefore, my part in their Halloween ritual is to say, "This is awful. You cannot do this."
And they always respond, with their dad grinning behind them, "Why not?"
And I always say, "Just because!"

I confess my tepid, ineffectual response comes from my own ambivalence toward my self-righteous position. In part, it's just familial pride. My sons have inherited their gallows humor from a long line of ancestors. I know their great-grandfather would have been right there with them, artfully touching up the dripping fake blood. Once on the way to my grandmother's funeral, my older brother and I discovered that some - just a dusting - of her ashes had spilled in the backseat of the car. There was nothing to do but wipe them away, along with the tears of laughter from our eyes. Frankly, we busted a gut, and our grandmother would have roared right along with us, if she had been there with us. Well, she was there, but you know what I mean.

And I've always secretly agreed with them that the whole point of Halloween is to turn the world upside down for just one night. It's such a deliciously pagan holiday. In its candy-coated primitive way, it suggests that their one-day fit of mock-badness will chase away any truly bad stuff. It will vaccinate them from bad things both outside and inside.

Still, I'm the mom. So, every year, I trump their callous attitude with the following question: "What about all the two-year-olds and three-year-olds out trick-and-treating? They're too tender for this. Do you really want to frighten babies?"

That slows them down. But not for long. They point out that their little brother, now a gung-ho four-year-old, was never bothered even in his extreme youth by their Halloween scenes. "Kids," they tell me with more than a tad of condescension, "know the difference between fake and real."

This year, when my sons' launch their Halloween planning meetings, I listen, however, without any internal ambivalence. There will be no gruesome scene on the front lawn this year, this, the year of September 11th.

Before, however, I can make my traditional, annual, historically unheeded ruling, my husband speaks up.

"No, boys," he says. "Not this year."

"Why not?" they ask, astonished by their turn-coat Dad.

"Just because," he says quietly.

Then I knew there really would be no mock-badness, no fake horror on our front lawn.

"Because," I tell them, "this year, the grownups are too tender."

The boys nod. They know.

It is as if all our rituals - all the ways in which we magically vaccinate ourselves against truly bad stuff - have failed. Kids have their ritual at Halloween. Grownups, perhaps more aware of bad stuff than most kids, have theirs all year long. Hollywood doles out the grownups' doses of thrill and fear; and we eagerly pay seven bucks to take our shots in the arm. We read murder mysteries. We imagine disaster in the middle of the night. Now, however, the worst things we can imagine have escaped the borders of our minds and become real. Our ritual vaccinations didn't take; we got the disease anyway.

So what are my boys learning after September 11th, and in the continuing roll of scary news? That there is really is truly bad stuff out there. It isn't pretend, and we can't scare it away with a bloody dummy.

What can we do instead? We can face real danger with real courage. We can treat each other with tenderness. We can find ways to laugh at the gallows.

The planning board meetings in the back of the minivan have continued. "Okay," says my ten-year-old. "We still make a dummy. But this time it's an old lady sitting in a rocking chair. And, get this, she's reading Playgirl magazine!"