Congratulations!
You and/or your child look foolish.
Don't think that your friends don't think so. They do. Even if they're doing it too.
If you like Halloween and enjoy sliding into the skin of a vampire or the wings of a faery queen, if you enjoy the embodiment of the undead and/or Sesame Street characters, if you feel the overwhelming urge to cut a swath of dragon flesh or perform a deathblow zombie style, then I'm deeply sorry. You're beyond my reach.
Why do i dislike Halloween?
It's a special kind of ridiculous.
It's a holiday dedicated to making people feel far better about their shifty subconscious...oh, and it's about sugar. "Wake up fat-America, hundreds of thousands of room temperature calories await!" Maybe dentures, fillings and crowns should be a staple of the Halloween trick-or-treating fiasco. A free consultation with a faux zombie/dentist. That and a bottle of 5-hour Energy to help your waning metabolism.
It's a night filled with dangerous people (as they all are) openly pretending not to be themselves. It's a carefully crafted oxymoron: I'm going to spend time disguising myself behind a new identity...BUT I'm going to make sure all the people that I already know will know it's me so that they can appreciate my efforts.
What?!
Adult children!
Let me clarify one thing: I don't have a spiritual problem with the holiday—as in the whole, "I wasn't allowed to watch the Smurfs, He-Man and the Simpsons, and was never permitted to celebrate Halloween 'cause it was devil worship." No; it's not like that for me. I get a good, healthy dose of unease when people who already lie to themselves and everyone around them about who they are begin masking their identities behind shutters of makeup and plasticine wings. As if to say, "You never knew me anyway, now you don't recognize me either AND I don't even have to lie to your face about it!"
Ahh, sweet Trifecta.
It's fitting that the "holiday" of Thanksgiving is carefully nested between two "holidays" of excess. As if to mock the very sentiment of the day itself. It's like a having a nice free range, antibiotic- and steroid-free chicken breast sandwiched between deep fried Twinkies slathered in Nutella, powdered sugar and chocolate sauce. You may as well just forget the chicken, or at least not invest so much in it.
Thanksgiving becomes a hilarious continuation of the "day-of-disguise," where a lot of people feign their "gratefulness" much the same way they feign their vampirism: You know and I know it's not real, but for that day, we're expected to accept the lie more so than other days.
And Oh, the HALLOwaste! Imagine i told you there was a holiday that people celebrated by going out and buying 15 pounds of non-biodegradeable, completely worthless crap. They then walk to the end of their driveways and proceed to throw every last ounce of it into the street haphazardly. Now, imagine that you're not imagining it.
And I ask: "why do they do it?"
Because it's a super meaningful expression of something tremendously important? Because it is a productive exercise of responsibility (fiscal, social and otherwise)? Because it really helps enrich a lot of people's lives, contributing to their growth as humans? Because it's just good, wholesome fun and nobody's getting hurt?
Yeah. I have no idea.
Here's what you've got: plastic costumes that come in plastic/cardboard packaging that will most likely be used ONCE then discarded; face paint (chock full o' toxins) that comes in plastic/aluminum packaging; candy that comes in individually wrapped bite-size dimensions: and there's the bags it comes in and the wrapping for each piece of candy; decorations, decorations, decorations, decorations and decorations—honestly people, how many plastic ghosts, spiderwebs and zombies could you possibly need to be faux-scared?! And one last point on waste: How many pumpkins do you have at your house around Halloween? What about your neighbor and your friend with the 5 kids—how many do they have? Consider that 50,000 pumpkins generate 200 metric tons of waste (source: http://www.ecosherpa.com/waste-management/halloween-waste-its-scaaaaary)
So, if you've absolutely GOTTA do it, please compost/recycle your entertainment when it's done with you.
Here's a good place to start:
http://environment.about.com/od/greenhalloween/ss/green_halloween.htm
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR: William Teckmyer is a veteran cynic, with over 30 years of experience. He specializes in finding gray linings to silver clouds & pot-kettle philosophy. He swears in public.
