Halloween costumes have come a long way since I was a child.
In fact, given what our generation was forced to wear, it really is a miracle any of us lived long enough to become parents ourselves. That’s because our parents purchased costumes with a plastic mask. The elastic band holding the mask in place was apparently designed to fit the average grapefruit.
By the time you got home, you had two permanent indentations on either side of your head and had inhaled enough carbon dioxide to qualify for medical observation. Oftentimes, slits in the mask didn’t line up with human eyes, so most of the time you were walking around looking at white plastic.
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We were dressed in highly flammable plastic, sometimes carrying sharp objects, and crossing streets in the dark. If your costume didn’t fog up from your own breath, you probably weren’t wearing it correctly.
I’m pretty certain these costumes were designed by parents because the slit where your mouth was supposed to be was so small that it was guaranteed no one could hear you even if you threw a tantrum.
When you finally arrived home from a night of “Trick or Treating” the band from the mask would get caught in your hair as you took it off your head. Once you wrestled the mask off your head, you’d spend the next thirty minutes watching your parents go through all your candy to make sure nothing contained poison or razor blades.
The latter was especially interesting. Every year, our parents warned us that some deranged individual was hiding razor blades in Halloween apples. I can only speak for myself, but personally that was one risk I wasn’t willing to take.
After the inspection, you felt fairly confident that the candy wouldn’t kill you, but you couldn’t be entirely certain. Yes, back in my day we lived on the edge never being entirely certain if any given Halloween would be our last. Still, I don’t know a single kid my age who didn’t risk an unpleasant demise for the pleasure of consuming a bag of M&Ms or Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.
As if suffocating in a plastic mask and being poisoned by a miniature candy bar weren't enough, we were also subjected to annual television broadcasts of The Wizard of Oz. Those flying monkeys terrified me.
Recently, someone asked me why I don’t like Halloween. I believe the previous paragraphs speak for themselves.
Ah, the good old days.
Today’s kids enjoy a much different (and humane) experience. I imagine it’s because the costumes my generation endured were outlawed under the Geneva Convention. Children today have the most realistic and thus expensive costumes in history.
Halloween costumes are now elaborate theatrical productions requiring months of planning, hundreds of dollars, and a mother who knows her way around a glue gun.
Some mothers begin preparing their children’s Halloween costume in July and by September have hired a structural engineer. Floats in the Rose Bowl Parade seem thrown together compared to what some moms come up with for their offspring.
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For them, it’s just not good enough that their daughter’s Cinderella looks like she just stepped out of the castle at the Magic Kingdom. No, this mom spends weeks turning a little red wagon into a carriage so that Trick or Treating takes half the time as Mom accepting kudos for her creativity at every house in the neighborhood.
When it comes to Halloween costumes, I think the girl moms have it much tougher than the boy moms. Pick up a lightsaber on a Disney trip and most boy moms can fake it through the entire evening. That doesn’t mean Halloween overall is easier. Try breaking up a lightsaber fight between two seven-year-old boys who've consumed their combined body weight in Skittles, and you may decide that sewing individual sequins onto a butterfly costume isn't such a bad way to spend October.
In my book, it’s a toss-up.
Here’s a little something that isn’t often discussed about Halloween and costumes.
Anywhere in the United States, October 31st is likely to be chilly if not downright cold. We live in Texas, so you’d think we’d escape that. We don’t. In Texas, Halloween is the only day of the year when you can leave the house dressed for a beach vacation and return looking like a survivor of the Donner Party.
Still, it’s likely better than the rest of the country.
The further north you go, the more challenging the costume. Imagine spending weeks planning your daughter’s fairy princess costume only to have to cover it up with a giant puffy coat just to get through the evening. She ends up looking less like a fairy princess and more like a linebacker wearing a tiara. And who has ever seen Batman in long underwear and snow boots?
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Among moms, there are also the serious over-achievers. They aren’t satisfied dressing their children for the Broadway . No, they have to outfit their entire family the same way. I have to give these women some credit. If you can convince your husband and children to all dress as characters from The Incredibles without an argument, you don’t need to be orchestrating Halloween. You need to run for president.
Years from now, I doubt our children will remember whether Cinderella's carriage had working headlights or whether their butterfly wings were anatomically correct. They'll remember running through the neighborhood with their friends, collecting candy, and coming home with more chocolate than any child should be allowed to consume.
Just like we did.
The only difference is that we accomplished all of this while wearing highly flammable plastic, breathing through a hole the size of a pencil eraser, and wondering whether the next miniature Snickers might be our last.
And we loved every minute of it.
Well, except for the flying monkeys.
I still haven't recovered from those flying monkeys.
