Halloween Hell

Let me say, for the record, that I hate Halloween.

Hate. It.

It is my least favorite holiday, with Valentine’s Day taking a close second. (But that’s another post, entirely.)

Why, you ask?

Perhaps if I explain in the form of a haiku…

Halloween costume
Striking terror in my heart
My ideas suck

Yeppers. I hate the pressure of coming up with a really cool Halloween costume. Perhaps it was because so many of my childhood costumes…well…sucked. (No offense, mom.)

To be honest, I couldn’t tell you what I was for many a Halloween. The costumes were either that unremarkable, or I’ve completely blocked it out. (I’m leaning towards the latter.)

For example, may I present:

Firstly, I hate clowns. They scare the sh*t out of me. Growing up, we had a book called “Look, Look, a Clown Book” that gave me the heebie-bejeebies, and when I came across it at my mom’s house on a recent trip, it still gave me the shudders. So…that clown costume?

My worst nightmare.

I don’t know what’s worse – the fact that I’m dressed as a clown, or that I’m wearing one of my mom’s wigs to “finish off the look”. (And why she had a wig JUST LIKE HER OWN HAIR is a totally different question.)

To make matters worse, my sister had the “cool” costume – she was the stoplight (although, I don’t know what the deal is with the creepy executioners mask).  My dad wired up the lights to bunch of doorbells that he attached to the side, and when she pushed one of the doorbell buttons, the color would light up. *It came in handy when crossing a busy street.

*It was cool to us at the time…

I suppose I should be lucky that I didn’t get dressed as a scarecrow. I don’t know what the hell was up with that costume or the completely non-PC blackface; I’m not actually sure who that is, which is probably a good thing.

There is serious pressure in coming up with a good Halloween costume, and you never escape it. It sucked right through college (because then I wanted to look cool and cute), and then after college, when some good friends started their annual Halloween party.

Oh, the stories I could tell from those parties. But I won’t.  Thankfully, at that time we were all into going as a group, so we’d have a theme: the three little pigs and the farmer’s wife (obviously, we were no longer concerned with the “cute” or “cool” part of my previous requirement – no one can pull off cool wearing a pig nose.)  Sadly, because all my photo albums are in storage back in the U.S., I have no evidence photos of those debacles to share.

Thankfully, I’m comfortable enough with my complete and total lack of skills in the sewing department to even consider making a costume for my kids, so the pressure is off there. I’m darn good with eBay, though, and Etsy has been helpful too, so they had some cute costumes before we moved to the UK, where Halloween is very different from how we do it in the States.

And still, even when I took my kids on a surprise trick or treat outing tonight (the biggest surprise being that I hadn’t planned on it, so Boo didn’t have a “proper” costume), I was given a hard time because I wasn’t dressed up.

(Dude, like the “boo” tshirt from 2005 wasn’t good enough?)

Funny that, one of Boo’s little friends thought it was a “boo” in the form of a “thumbs down, that’s dreadful”, and not the scary “boo”.

Huh. A bit of a subliminal message, perhaps?

And since there is no Reese’s Peanut butter cups to pinch from my son’s candy bucket tonight, I still hate Halloween.

Even if we did have fun tonight.