Emily Parnell: Switch Witch absconds with son’s childhood belief in magic

Get out your looms, parents, it’s time to start weaving those webs of half-truths and fairy tales.

Halloween merchandise is being cleared off the shelves to make room for jolly elves and flying reindeer, and each family will soon be spreading their lore of choice.

Since Charlie Brown’s Great Pumpkin never really took shape, and Halloween’s phantoms and ghosts were much too scary to be considered real, Nov. 1 used to launch the season of magic for my young pups. But that was before a friend told my daughter about a new hag in town, the Switch Witch.

Our family only had one encounter with that darned Switch Witch, and she absconded with something much more precious and irreplaceable than our candy. She bagged up my son’s childhood beliefs in magic and flew away with them. And parents, we waited for the Polar Express to show up, but sadly, it did not. Once their belief is gone, it’s gone.

If you haven’t heard of the Switch Witch, she’s pretty new to the cadre of magical beings. She’s a kick-start to gift-giving season, a member of the militant order of sugar police.

My daughter, Sylvia, and her best friend are avid collectors of Littlest Pet Shop figurines, also known as LPS. Sylvia’s friend had been visited by the Switch Witch, who gave the girl an LPS and took away her Halloween booty. Sylvia swooned and asked if the Switch Witch could do the same for her.

“Oh, but of course,” I said and then Googled the Switch Witch to find her contact information. Not finding an email or a phone number, I dug out my pointy witch hat, sheared my magical sheep, sat down at my enchanted spindle and began to spin a yarn.

Early on, the Switch Witch ran into trouble. LPS had been redesigned and the items had been liquidized. She found an alternative and made the swap.

But the swap was unsatisfactory, and Sylvia’s sentiment of being short-changed wasn’t the worst of it. Her heartbreaking conclusion that the Switch Witch didn’t like her spurned more action.

You see, as long as that yarn was spinning, there was no stopping it until the Switch Witch’s job had been done. A simple $3 item was not too much to ask for an entire Halloween haul, and we couldn’t leave the wreckage of tears. The good witch hit the Internet and mail-ordered some LPS, then wrote a letter explaining the delay. “What you get will be magical,” she promised.

Finally, the LPS arrived, complete with a letter written in a scrawl with burned edges on the paper, clearly the stationery of a witch. “I’m entrusting you with these very special LPS. Please take good care of them,” the letter told my spellbound Sylvia. It was all roses and fairy dust in our household until she took her new prized possessions into Trader Joe’s. Inexplicably, before our very eyes, one of the LPS lept from her little hand into the freezer. The Trader Joe manager hung his head as he informed us that there was no possible way to retrieve it.

More stories followed, this time concocting a little-known land of fairies and gnomes that inhabit the netherworld of Trader Joe’s.

The snowball simply could not be stopped.

Meanwhile, my son had watched from the periphery. He observed the Internet search for LPS. He heard the stories that grew and morphed. He suspected something was fishy — and he was right.

“Mom,” he finally asked, “are you the Switch Witch?”

I held my breath. His eyes that brimmed with tears before I even answered.

“Are you ready for the truth?” I asked him. His lip quivered, and he nodded.

I told him the truth.

“So, is everything like that?” he asked.

Childhood magic lost its sparkle for him that day, revealing the humble and simple truths that remain. But, I assured him, though things aren’t always as they seem, he could be sure that they are rooted in love.

This story was originally published November 3, 2015 at 4:16 PM with the headline "Emily Parnell: Switch Witch absconds with son’s childhood belief in magic."