The nursery where I work has started putting on a Halloween event for the kids. When I worked at a floral shop in my former floral design life, all of us were, by definition, creative—we designed with flowers.  What I never realized is what a like-minded family I would also find with people drawn to working with plants. There is not a person working with plants at the nursery that isn't artsy or creative in some way, shape or form, many in a number of venues. I love this, all this  artsy, creative energy. We like dressing up in costume and creating Halloween theater for the kids. We like building a burlap/ corn stalk maze. We like drawing fantastical examples for the draw-a-monster station. We like creating a witch hunt to find strategically-named and accessorized witches, like the water pond witch ready to enhance her brew with a toad in one hand and a mushroom in the other. New this year, and one of my favorites, was the origami mummy station, designed by one of the guys, a single father of two, after discovering these folded-paper googley-eyed creatures with his own kids. I already knew this fellow liked to write; yesterday, I discover he likes origami, too. Fabulous.

Our resident college-aged costume master this year showed up as Belle come to life from Disney's Beauty and the Beast. She had taken her lemony-yellow bride's maids gown—and good riddance, too—and found the exact perfect fabric match to make an overbodice with dropped shoulder-strap sleeves exactly like Belle's. Then she and her friend worked into the night to pinch the skirt into tucks held up by buttons all around (check the cartoon; this was perfect). She made her entrance with her dark-brown Belle-colored hair crowned with a little top knot wrapped with yellow ribbon and long yellowish (the dye didn't work quite perfectly but the effect was so dreamy this was insignifcant) gloves, her sparkling "diamond" teardrop earrings finishing the effect. When I pulled up the theme song from Beauty and the Beast on YouTube so she could waltz around the bulbs and seed racks, her bell skirt swinging perfectly, I almost needed a pinch to be sure I wasn't dreaming.

For two hours, we entertained the kids who showed up with their parents. Dressed as a Gypsy fortune teller, I called GHOST bingo and helped the kids "paint" little pumpkins with magic markers. Our human resource-manager-turned-witch-for the day helped our greenhouse-manager/chef-for-a-day run musical chairs, then took a break from standing in her mean-looking black leather heels to read a couple spooky stories. Origami father, dressed in an eighties Disco Dancer costume, also took a turn running pumpkin bowling, which is as it sounds—using a small round pumpkin to bowl over the pins, and, as I discovered last year when I tried it, crazy good fun because the pumpkins are, of course, not completely round.

In the middle of this happy mayhem, on a slight breather between activities, I found myself near the check-out counters. A tall attractive white-haired woman asked me if she could pay the rest of her landscape bill. I'm the florist. I rarely use the register for the simplest of transactions; this one was over my head. Belle was stuck on the phone with a customer who seemed to have no end of questions, or maybe just one specific question that couldn't be be answered, but the customer was going to keep trying. I waited with the tall women, watching Belle, thinking she was going to be finished any second, but she wasn't.

The woman was becoming more and more impatient. "I'll have to come back next weekend."

No, this was not optimal. I could see from the bill in her hand she had a sizable balance to pay off, and it was all of our jobs to facilitate this. So I turned my gaze to the other staffers, seeing if there was someone I could pull away that would know how to do this transaction. The woman turned her gaze with me. But we could both see, everyone was engaged with the children.

I tried to get the chef's attention. No luck.

"Really," our New England resident exclaimed, in a tone not unlike a British school marm. "There's quite a bit of mayhem here. I'll come back." Her expression tight, she was clearly rather put out. I looked around some more. Disco Dancer was nowhere to be seen—outside, no doubt in the outdoor bowling alley aside the statuary garden. Human Resource Witch was helping run musical chairs surrounded by an audience of parents, shovels and rakes.

I turned back to Belle. Lemony, sunny Belle now stood gripping the phone in her gloved hand, a deep furrow in her forehead, still making no progress. Just when all was about lost, and one didn't need the second sight to know the only thing that was going to keep this customer waiting any longer was me grabbing her with my be-ringed ands, one of our owners reentered the building. Saved. He made the transaction.

But as I walked back to my GHOST bingo post, I couldn't help but feel a bit put out myself—by the women's attitude. Halloween is for the kids. And for the kid in all of us. A bit of fun crazy mayhem is exactly what belongs going on around Halloween.

So Halloween Scrooge, I have to say, Boo to you!

And to everyone else, a most HAPPY HALLOWEEEEEEEEN!!