You all know Ebenezer Scrooge, right? Well, come about the middle of October,
that’s me. I’m him. Basically, we’re kindred spirits, only with a
different holiday pissing us off.
I. Hate. Halloween.
There. I
said it. Or wrote it, actually, but I’d be happy to announce it with a loud booming voice
to anyone willing to listen. For years,
I tried to deny my true feelings about October 31st, but I’m all
about the love yourself as you are thing these days and what I love about
myself is that I HATE HALLOWEEN.
As a child, I liked Halloween. I mean, I liked chocolate. A LOT.
Therefore, I liked Halloween. When
the gathering free chocolate part of Halloween faded, however, and the holiday
became strictly about dressing up, my inner Scrooge began to develop. In college, there were Halloween socials. Really? That’s what you want to do to try and meet cute boys – put on a costume and face paint and a wig and be all “It’s so nice to meet you but let me offer you a quick disclaimer and let you know I’m only dressed up as Dolly Parton and when I take off this costume I don’t look quite so Dolly and by the way who exactly are you supposed to be and before this goes any further, are those your real eyebrows?”
Once I became a parent, the Scrooge in me disappeared
for a few years. When my kids were
young, I looked forward to celebrating Halloween with them each fall. Halloween meant reading books about pumpkins
and parties and trick-or-treating. It meant
putting gourds in a pretty bowl on the dining room table as a centerpiece. It meant filling a vase with candy corn and
sticking a candle in the middle of it to put on the kitchen counter. It meant taking a family trip to the pumpkin patch
and carving Jack-o-lanterns on the deck while pumpkin seeds roasted in the oven
and dressing my toddlers in matching costumes to take pictures by the mums on
our front porch.
Now, I’m the parent of a seven and a nine year old,
and you can just call me Ebenezer. My kids don’t want me to read Pumpkin Soup to them anymore. They don’t care about gourds, they want to eat the candy corn on the kitchen counter for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and they think a jack-o-lantern can only be carved from the biggest, most expensive pumpkin in the patch. Now, before we’ve even flipped the calendar from September to October, the first thing I hear every morning is, “Mom, we have to go get our costumes today because if we don’t get them today they will all be completely gone and there won’t be any left and we won’t get what we want and Halloween will be ruined and no one will give us candy because we won’t have costumes so can we please go costume shopping right this very minute because I’m dying to put on some cheap polyester and see how amazing I look?”
Could the ghost of Halloween past please appear and take me back to 2008, because my kids were the cutest little Mickey and Minnie Mouse you’ve ever seen that year, and not only were they absolutely adorable, they were perfectly content with one lollipop and a Hershey bar in their trick-or-treat bags.
I took my kids costume shopping early this month, because I certainly didn’t want their lack of the perfect costume to be my fault, and what I need to know is . . .
What in the name of normal has happened to Halloween?
Everywhere I looked, I saw blood and guts and gore and chainsaws. There were freaky masks and headless creatures and hairy spiders the size of my refrigerator. There were warts and claws and fangs and amputations. And the icing on the cake . . . the best decoration of them all . . . well, it was at the very front of the store. No way you could miss it. It was a little girl, wearing a dress, who started to move when you got close to her. She had a disturbing stance and ruthless eyes, and, I kid you not, the child was eating a brain. A BRAIN people.
Really?
Of course, my children wanted to buy it. They thought it would be great to have a little girl munching on a brain on our front porch this Halloween. To replace the mums, no doubt. And I have exactly one thing to say about that.
