5 Reasons Halloween Is My Least Favorite Day
Boo, it's Halloween, a day that for some reason I just don’t understand, is often listed as people's favorite holiday, and yet, I admit that I have deep-seated and irrational emotional feelings about the day. For me, Halloween is more like Boo the **** Hoo. I don't get it, although it's MUCH better now that my kids are grown. At least I've started the day writing with a nice cup of coffee by my side instead of fighting with some kid over any number of Halloween-based issues.So what is it about the day that I find so tedious, tiresome and terrorizing?
Halloween marks the death of summer and sunshine and birds singing and ice cream and late sunsets and joy: Once I set my clocks back tonight, a darkness will descend over the earth and ice will fall from the sky and everyone will get sick and my hands and feet will feel no warmth for the next 6 months. It's basically Armageddon. And, between Thanksgiving, Christmas and basically the end of February, I'll gain about seven pounds and hate myself. It all begins today.
Halloween is a long, logistical nightmare: And I mean NIGHTMARE, of the Halloween kind...From the time your kid can speak, you will begin to fight over costume choices, and then the only costume they will want will be the one SPECIFICALLY listed at the top of the “ABSOLUTELY CAN'T WEAR” list of the costumes the school sends home months in advance. Fighting ensues about where they can trick or treat, whether they need adult supervision, who they walk around with, what time they need to be home, and so on and so on til the deceased of the world are turning in their graves. Keep in mind, that if you choose a costume that is sleeveless or has short sleeves it will inevitably be ten degrees. If you choose a costume that will keep little Bobby warm, it’s bound to be a record high temperature day turning the school parade into a strip show. By the time your kid parades around in his costume, eats two tons of Halloween party candy, completes some overly creative arts and crafts project that some overly zealous, thinks Halloween is the cat's meow and is dressed inappropriately as a cat class mom, is inspired to have little Bobby make, the costumes a ****show by the time it arrives back home with jacked-up on candy Bobby. You then have 20 minutes to fix the costume, make and eat dinner and get Bobby ready to head out for the fun. At the end of the night, just when everyone is exhausted and testy, and hyped up on sugar, Bobby will announce, "Mrs. B says we have to count and categorize all of our candy." With that, Bobby passes out with black face paint all over his sheets, and you settle in to categorize Smarties, Butterfingers, Reeses and Twizzlers. You eat a lot of it. And add wine.
Halloween reinforces all the clique, mean girls, cool guys horror of childhood for kids and adults: When Bobby arrives home after school, his costume barely hanging in/on. While you attempt to recreate what took you months of shopping, prepping, fighting about and gluing, Bobby is screaming because if you don't hurry up, his friends will leave to trick or treat without him. Meanwhile fourteen year-old Jessica is miserable because she just got home and said that three of her so-called or so assumed BFF's have all dressed up alike and didn't include her. Now she feels like an idiot trick or treating with them because she's the odd one out. It's at this point that you need to reach for the tequila. You've been good all day and although you'd hoped to hold out til 4:00 pm, it's close enough. There's a limit to what you can handle and you've arrived there. Plus, tonight at the adult-only neighborhood costume party, you're feeling high schoolishly insecure about your slutty pirate costume. What will the other women think? Better double down on that cocktail.
Halloween brings out people who like to be terrified and there’s something seriously wrong with them: Halloween fills my television screen with horror and anxiety. The TV guide is full of every person's nightmares night after miserable, October night. Once I saw "The Exorcist" in high school and then slept between my parents for three nights, I was done. No horror movies, corn mazes, haunted houses for me. I can barely get through Disney's Haunted Mansion without hives. What is wrong with you people who love this crap? Why, why, why do you love to scream? I also have an aversion to Halloween decorations. Why would anyone choose to have spiderwebs, spiders, headless horsemen, witches, scary pumpkins, hatchets, fake blood, gravestones and dead people decorating his/her lawn? SERIOUSLY, THERE'S SOMETHING WRONG WITH YOU!
Halloween always causes some controversy: Whether the issue is with you and your kids about what they can wear as a costume, (sorry, but no matter how loudly or how long little Bobby screams, he is not going to school with a fake axe sticking out of his head and blood running down his face in Kindergarten or any other grade for that matter), nor is newly ample breasted fourteen-year-old Jessica using Halloween as an excuse to wear, what would any other day be highly inappropriate clothing that, let's just say, enhances her new look. (That costume is for the adult women like me who decide irrationally that Halloween is the time to bring out the inappropriate you. And I’m not alone in this. Party City is full of the stuff and take a look around any adult Halloween party. The long hair wigs, short leather skirts and corsets abound). Schools also chime in on what’s appropriate costume material: No weapons, no masks, and, more recently, no gender switching was added. I find that one interesting. We seem to embrace gender switching on multiple TV shows, but I guess we can't let our girls dress up as boys or our guys dress up as girls for fun in school anymore. Once parents have finished fighting the school districts about freedom of expression, schools come up with rules about the parties and whether they will allow candy etc. The whole event makes for some amazing conversations with your friends and neighbors and some of them are as horror filled as the day itself.
Thankfully, Halloween only comes once a year and thank goodness, this is one day of the year that I'm thrilled to have no kids at home anymore, although, his freshman year of college, my youngest son called to tell me he'd charged a wheelchair… yes, that's not a misprint… a wheelchair, on his credit card as part of his costume. My response was quite Halloweenish, instilling enough fear and horror into him to cover several decades of Halloween nightmares. But for now, I'll enjoy no kids here and instead have a blast watching my oldest son and his wife deal with my granddaughter every Halloween. It will be my pleasure to sit back and watch the hell of Halloweens past unleash it's vengeance upon my own kids as they start the process all over again in their own homes.
Trick or treat. Happy Halloween.