The Finest of Holidays

The Finest of Holidays

October 19, 2009, 1:48 am
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: almond bark, Halloween, Hippie Goth Pirate, Jell-O salad, rubber spiders

Halloween’s coming up, which means we’re warming up for the holiday season. Now that I think about it, whoever came up with the idea of Halloween was a genius. It’s like a warm-up for Thanksgiving and Christmas, except that you can’t possibly screw things up so badly that it’s not appropriate. Think about it. For Christmas, you have to carefully and lovingly place thousands of Christmas lights all around your house, which often requires you to stand on a two-story ladder in the snow while you try with frostbitten hands to prevent the ends of the strings from hanging down funny. For Halloween, you tear up some cotton balls and call it a spider web. For Thanksgiving, you spend weeks perfecting your recipes and experimenting with different spices, and then when the time comes, you realize that everyone else in your family already brought Jell-O salad, and they all put berries in theirs. For Halloween, you dip some Nutter Butters in almond bark and say it’s a ghost. And if you screw up the faces, it’s because, hey, it’s scarier that way.

I also love Halloween because it’s the one holiday where you’re allowed to be cheap and tacky. During the rest of the year, you’re not allowed to put rubber spiders and traffic-cone orange plastic pumpkins in your house, but for Halloween, the more fake something looks, the better. I especially love this because every year my sister and I lobby heavily to have our Christmas theme be “a tacky Christmas”. We try to put up our really cheap plastic Santa slide (which, by the way, makes a highly irritating Ding! Ding! sound) and the Christmas ornaments we make out of paper bags when we were in preschool. Needless to say, every year Mom shoots us down, and we go with her idea, “things from our basement”.

But my problem this Halloween is finding a costume. I suppose I could go with one of the old standbys – hippie, goth, or pirate – but really, what fun is that? Earlier this year I bought a hoop skirt (see “One-Upping Wal-Mart”) which I was hoping to wear for Halloween, but since I lent it to one of the actresses in our community theater for a play, and we need to adjust it to different sizes, that’s really not an option.

And in my case, I feel like I have to meet certain standards with my costume. I don’t mean to brag, but I did once win a costume contest while dressed as a Starfleet officer. True, I was in sixth grade at the time, but it set a high bar for the rest of my life. I also did well as a butterfly, a stegosaurus, and The Queen of Hearts.

So here’s my costume ideas that have made it to the semi-finals:

1. Frances McDormand from Fargo – For me, this wouldn’t really require any specialized costume pieces. Just slap a pillow under my shirt for a pregnant belly, and I’d be ready to go. Plus, it would give me an excuse to quote the movie all night.

2. Nancy Pelosi – I feel I could scare a lot of people in Edgeley.

3. A Chocoholic – I figure this is a good way to avoid having to explain myself when I pig out on Halloween candy.

4. A Hippie Goth Pirate – If I forget it’s Halloween.

So there you have it. I feel all these ideas are appropriately cheap and tacky for Halloween. Although the Hippie Goth Pirate is sounding like and excellent idea for Christmas…

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