How I learned to stop worrying and to appreciate Halloween

My first Halloween displayRenée Graham

For no particular reason, I never much cared for Halloween.

Even as a kid, I wanted nothing to do with it. I didn’t want to put on a costume. I didn’t want to ratchet up the performative cuteness and hustle candy from neighbors. I didn’t want to gut a pumpkin.

Perhaps, as a relative once suggested, I never longed to be someone else even for a night. (I loved this explanation but also knew better.) There were also the apocryphal stories about malicious strangers handing out apples embedded with needles, candy tainted by rat poison, and other horrors from the mean Halloween streets.

Plus I was creeped out by the skeletons, headstones, and other unsettling references to death, something I already thought about too much. On any trip past a cemetery, I would look away fearing I might see the undead strolling about. Frankly I blame my mother, a big-time horror movie fan who took her overly imaginative child to see scare-fests like “Night of the Living Dead” and “The Abominable Dr. Phibes.”

My feelings about the holiday got no better as an adult. This was especially awkward as a member of the LGBTQ community, which loves All Hallows’ Eve beyond all measure and has transformed it into a much-adored queer holiday.

Still, I wasn’t convinced. But a “free” pumpkin somehow (slightly) thawed my chilly feelings toward Halloween.

In truth, it was neither a real pumpkin nor was it free. It was a “GWP,” which is Lego jargon for a gift with purchase given to customers when they hit a certain spending threshold during a limited period. Last month, one of those GWPs was a buildable pumpkin and ghost. I wasn’t interested. When the clerk put the small box in my bag, I almost said, “No thanks, you can keep it.”

A few hours after I got home, I put it together. It was a fast build and sorta cute. But what really got me was a light brick that, when the brown stem is pressed, lit the pumpkin up as if there was a candle glowing inside. There was something about the simplicity and ingenuity that made me smile. And in a time when a day rarely passes without hearing the phrase “existential threat,” I’m open to every smile I can get.

I put the pumpkin on a shelf, but every morning when I walked into the room, I would press the stem and smile. Somehow, that led me to add to my display a few small pumpkins from old Lego sets. Then came a couple of bats and a spider web. I plucked a skeleton from a castle build, an owl from a “Harry Potter” set, and a fearsome looking Dungeons & Dragons minifigure — the little plastic people that populate Lego sets — and surrounded everything with a crumbling wall and fallen leaves. Every time I added or subtracted something, I did a new reveal for my occasionally obliging partner.

This, from someone who once tried to use a religious exemption to get out of doing a Halloween art project in 5th grade.

At times it felt a little obsessive, but it also served as a kind of antianxiety therapy. I could do with this evolving Halloween display what I couldn’t do with the deeply troubling things happening in the world — easily change what was in front of me.

I also found myself suddenly admiring my neighbors’ meticulous Halloween displays. Some went well beyond the typical pumpkins, spiders, and ghosts. They incorporated characters from horror classics like Freddy Krueger from “A Nightmare on Elm Street” and Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lecter from “Silence of the Lambs.” And yes, I was scoping out ideas for my much-smaller Halloween display.

When my New York Mets missed their first World Series appearance since 2015 earlier this month, I lost the distraction that I needed to keep me sane during this fretful national moment. A small plastic pumpkin has given my mind both a safe place and a different appreciation of a day that means so much to so many.

Do I love Halloween now? Well, no. Especially now that I’m deep into the memorial service stage of my life, I can do with fewer lawns festooned with fake tombstones. But I can appreciate the desire to dress up as someone or something else — to change without consequence — and get a harmless scare when the worst horrors we may face will endure far longer than almost any scowling, orange pumpkin head.

This is an excerpt from Outtakes, a Globe Opinion newsletter from columnist Renée Graham. Sign up to get Outtakes in your inbox each week.