Oh, the Horror!

The cute!

Why is Halloween such a monster event these days? Pun intended.  Halloweens of my childhood were one day affairs. A pumpkin was carved, mom taped a few decorations to the front window, a lame costume was thrown together and out you went. Back home, you dumped out your candy bag and began trading with the siblings for more of the good stuff. That was pretty much it. In a big year dad got a few fireworks and sparklers to set off in the yard. By the last year of elementary school it was all over. After that you got stuck with door duty unless you were a popular, cool kid and got invited to Halloween parties in your teens. Not me. I got door duty.
Once I left home I got invited to a few adult Halloween parties and they were always fraught with the stress of coming up with a costume. I'm fairly creative but costumes are not my thing. They ranged from the cute to the really bad.

The only thing worse than my
Minnie was the Gandolf next
to me.

I knew some people who planned all year for Halloween, trying to outdo their costumes of previous years, especially the couples. Gluing, sewing, building, painting, nothing was too much trouble to be the star of the party or event. I have to admit some of these costumes were pretty amazing but worth the effort? I don't know about that.
Then along came my children and Halloween in our house was a hugely popular event.  It was my youngest son's favourite day of the year. I have very creative children and they wanted their costumes to be unusual and individual. As long as they came up with the ideas, ( boy, did they) I could manage to pull the costumes together. I searched thrift stores with them, sewed superhero outfits, did elaborate hair and make-up, purchased grotesque masks, and more than made up for my own paltry efforts before they arrived in my life.Yes, I was indulgent.  I decorated with straw bales and pumpkins, cobwebs and candles. I baked 'witches fingers' cookies and helped out with the Spookfest event at their school. It was exhausting and my efforts were nowhere near the top of the heap in the overcharged atmosphere of suburban parenting. The demands got greater every year, Halloween was becoming out of control, fuelled by a plethora of cheap decorations at Costco and Walmart playing into the riotous imaginations of kids. Adults that loved Halloween turned their yards into graveyards, dressed in costume to answer the door and put out door mats that played spooky music when stepped on. Ack!

And turn into monsters!

They start our adorable....

The kids coming to the door got older and older. Teen-aged boys that shaved every day showed up on my doorstep dressed in their snowboarding outfits holding out a pillow case. Come on, dude, grow up, it's just candy! I told my boys that it ended with elementary school, after that they were on their own. If they wanted to embarrass themselves by trick or treating past grade seven, go for it, just count me out.  I still carved a pumpkin, hung a few decorations around the door and loaded up on candy for the kids. I was still on door duty. Slowly the fervour around Oct.31st waned around our house and then we moved into Vancouver where Halloween seems almost non-existent. It was like I had stopped banging my head against the wall.
Today we live a few blocks from an elementary school and on my walks I pass by houses with decorations on the lawn and cobwebs in the bushes.  It's obvious there are kids in the area so last Halloween I put out a lit plastic pumpkin by the front door and bought a bag of treats then sat back and ate them while watching TV. Not a princess or a Pokemon rang the bell. I'm sure they were getting their treat bags filled at community centres or private parties or wherever, just not door to door. Maybe their poor moms are being driven crazy by the nightmare that is Halloween but I don't feel it or see it.

A couple Gokus that mean
business.

So what fuels the mania for Halloween? And why the hell did I get so caught up in it? Sometimes raising kids feels like a twenty year brain fog. The Estrogen Veil as it is known. You just don't know why you do what you do sometimes. It's like waking up from a night of drinking and remembering the crazy stuff you did without the memory of WHY you did it. My memories of my childhood Halloweens are all good, I wasn't trying to compensate for what I didn't have. Was it just a collective hysteria in the neighbourhood fed by the love we have for our children? Or a bunch of stay-at-home moms with too much untapped creativity waiting for a project?  Or are we just children in adults bodies getting a chance to tap into fun again?  But I'm done with that, the hysteria that is, not the love and this coming Monday evening will find me with the porch lights out, the TV on and my hand in a bag of mini Oh Henry's thoroughly enjoying Halloween my way.