Boo!

My (slightly late) Halloween story

All Hallows Eve. Halloween, the night when parents release their kids to neighborhoods dress in overpriced costumes supporting a commercialist society to gorge themselves on candy and be mischievous and get away with it. (Man, I’m such an old person.) No, really, I enjoy looking at most costumes. I remember dressing up when I was little and for the most part I had my sister’s hand-me-down costumes, but the ones that were my own, that Brooke never used, were my favorite. I went as a fifties girl in fourth grade (poodle skirt, scarf in my hair) and I loved it. I didn’t even get to go trick-or-treating that year because I got a cold, but I knew that I had the coolest costume that year in school. And one year, I think I was maybe three or four (this is one of my first memories), I was a witch, before I knew what witchcraft was. My dad and I went to a drugstore for some reason after school and a girl dressed as Pippi Longstocking with her hair in braids with wires in them made her hair stick straight up and screamed when she saw me like I scared her. I thought I was the best witch ever, it totally made my Halloween.

But I was a cute witch. Parents, when you dress your children, especially the young ones, remember that they think the boogey man is scary. There’s absolutely no need to dress them like they came straight from the Chasms of Hell. Chances are that if they look in the mirror they’ll get so freaked out they’ll have reflection issues for the rest of their lives or they’ve been exposed to so many scary things in their wee little lives that they’re already screwed up and are going to be ripping the heads off Barbies and burning pictures of dead people to release their souls as they get older.

Here’s another reason. Your child could very well cause wrecks because of his freakishness. I left work early on Halloween because traffic was rotten and I’m sitting at a light, waiting for it to turn green so I can turn left. As I’m turning, in the driver’s seat of a car waiting at the light, was this little person in red. How cute! I thought, a little Elmo, or maybe a fireman! So I slow down a little to get a closer look and I slowly begin to realize that no, it is not a sweet fireman or gentle Elmo, but a demon. A face-painted, scream-inducing scary little minion from the pits of the Abyss. Grinning like a vampire on feeding day. And as I’m coming to this slow, painful, nauseating revelation, I forget to finish turning my car. And as soon as my mind wraps its head around this awful creature and regains enough sense to look away, I look straight ahead to see my car heading right into an iron fence. So I swerve back into traffic, almost hitting the vehicle carrying the little imp. And with my tires squealing and steering wheel swinging, I look one time at the driver, the mother, Rosemary. She’s laughing her head off! At her precious child scaring the living daylights out of unsuspecting drivers on Briarcliff Road.

So here’s the moral of the story: don’t dress your child like something you’ve seen in horror movies because there are some people in the world who choose to keep hellish ideas out of their minds and sooner or later, you could get sued by the preacher’s kid who wrecks her car because she’s screaming the Lord’s Prayer after seeing your spawn.