My complete lack of interest is probably partly, if not
entirely, fed by my own childhood experiences. My mom was a total washout in
the costume department. I remember being about five things when I was a kid,
all of them lame. The year I was seven it was so bad that I didn’t even have a
costume, per se. She pulled out a blue tartan kilt and cape she’d bought me
during a previous summer vacation to Bermuda and said, “There. You’re Mary,
Queen of Scots.” Because I was kind of a weird kid, I knew who that was (sort
of), but seriously—what the fuck?
The last year I recall actually even trick or treating at
all was the year I was in 7th grade. All the girls in my class
(about 7 of us) spent the night at someone’s house and we didn’t so much go trick
or treating, as go out and see what kind of trouble we could get in. Being the
kind of kid I was, that wasn’t much, as it turned out. About the only thing of
note that happened was when we were spraying Silly String on the playground at
the local elementary school, and a flashlight beam came out of nowhere and
pinned us. The guy behind it said, “Stop—police.” And my friend Sarah—for
reasons that she has never been able to articulate—shot back, “Who you jivin’?”
and the cop replied, “I ain’t jivin’.” Oh shit.
Turned out they were looking for kids who were actually
tagging with spray paint. When they saw that all we had was Silly String, and
that we had no idea who the spray painters were, and hadn’t seen them, they let
us go. And that was pretty much the end of my career as a juvenile delinquent.
I was able to all but ignore Halloween from about 1982 until
fairly recently. About the only thing I’d do was give out candy (and hey,
seventh grade boys—here’s a tip: don’t go out in the same outfit you wore to school,
ring doorbells and hold out your bag for candy with a disaffected grunt. Show a
little spirit and put some effort into it, or you can just get your candy from
someone else’s house; you won’t be getting any of my Snickers Fun Size, you
little assholes. If you’re too embarrassed to say it, you’re too old to do it),
and possibly attend the occasional adult Halloween party. I’m not a complete
toad—I’d dress up. I remember one year I went as a teenager, which necessitated
me buying the first copy of Seventeen magazine I’d had since I was seventeen. You know, to see what the
kids were wearing.
But then I started having my own kids, and of course they
wanted in on this free candy thing, so I was forced to participate again. This
time I went to the other extreme, and started making all their costumes from
scratch.
Let me tell you about that. Making a costume from scratch
sounds awesome and supportive and dedicated. In reality it is stupid and
expensive and stressful. One year I made my four kids’ costumes and ended up
spending over SIX HUNDRED DOLLARS on the fabric, patterns, notions, what have
you. Six hundred bucks! And I was making shit like Pokemon. I had two kids who
wanted to be Pokemon that year, but of course they didn’t want to be the one
they actually sell the pattern for (his name is Pikachu, if you care, or if you
have an eight year old boy and it therefore means something to you). They
wanted to be these other bizarre ones that look like lizards and shit, and for
which of course you can’t just go out
and buy a pattern. So not only did I have to make them, I had to make them up. Three years in a row I spent the
weekend before Halloween in tears, swearing to God we weren’t going to do this
again next year (so I was a little slow in actually doing it).
So this year we did buy costumes. Now I see part of the
benefit of not buying them costumes.
When I’m making them, they can’t possibly wear them until they’re done (which
was usually October 30th at 10:30 p.m.). This year they’ve had them
for two weeks, and already they’ve wanted to wear them to about six different
places. Mean, mean Mommy refuses to allow this. Know why? I’ll tell you—it’s
because if I let them wear them to the zoo, the park, the grocery store, and
every other place they wanted to wear them for the 30 days prior to Halloween,
at 3 p.m. on October 31st, they would announce that they were bored
with whatever costume they’d been wearing for the last month, and that they
wanted to be, “something else.” This would cause me to lose my grip on what’s
left of my precious, fragile sanity.
So clearly this is a no win situation. I either stress
myself out emotionally and financially, or I spend a month being stressed out
because I have to keep refusing to allow them to go to every event dressed as a
wizard or Dead Man Rocking (a sort of zombie rock star—don’t ask) because
they’d get bored and/or ruin the costume and then have nothing to wear on
Halloween proper. About the only thing I can do at this point is just wait
until they claim to be too old for such foolishness. Which should take about
six more years.
I know when my kids are grown up, there are things I will
miss—I already miss that my daughter no longer refers biscuits as “bistiks,”
and that one of my twins no longer has that adorable baby lisp that caused him
to say things like “fwosting” instead of “frosting.” But I refuse to miss the
mayhem around Halloween. I’ve been over it for about thirty six years now.
