#44 - Chocolate Hangover

Chocolate Hangover

11/1/04 (#44)

As an adult, I have never been much for Halloween. Blame it on a well-balanced psyche, but I don't want to pretend to be someone else, even for a night. I don't like make-up, I don't have any enthusiasm for the planning of a costume, and while I wish the revelers a good time with their shenanigans, I have no desire to be a part of it. I admire people who transcend the pedestrian costume (Mr. Kotter at The Twilight made me laugh, and that guy who dressed as J.C. Blitz was a hoot) but I have no energy for it myself, so I end up in lame costumes like "accountant" and "certified accountant." (It's only the tie that separates the two.) To me, there has always been a clear dichotomy between the Halloween people (mayhem, revelry, inanity, drunkenness---and candy) and Thanksgiving people (Intimacy, relaxation, gluttony, drunkenness----and a 6-course meal.) I'm a Thanksgiving person.

But last night we took our daughter out for her first night of trick-or-treats. She wore an elephant costume, with a trunk that stuck straight up from her forehead as if she were a slate-gray unicorn. (We joked that she was the rare "Viagra elephant".) She never got the hang of saying "trick or treat", but she was a quick study for the physical logistics of the process---walk up to the house, get candy, go to the next house, repeat. (I fear that if we go for a walk tonight, she's going to want to take her pumpkin bag with her again.) As such, I am faced with embracing Halloween completely for the next 10 years or more because I want Sage to experience the holiday fully and not be writing essays in her sophomore composition class about how she grew up thinking that Halloween is a night when you turn off the lights and pretend you're not home.

And since parenthood requires me to go over to the dark side, I want to go on record with a few thoughts on Halloween:

• In my lifetime, I have witnessed a metamorphosis of Halloween. Growing up, the "Halloween Decorations" aisle was the shortest aisle in the store, populated with cardboard witches, stylized cardboard arched-back black cats, and a slim selection of ceramic jack-o-lanterns. Decorating your house for Halloween night meant pumpkins on the porch and the porch light on. Occasionally a neighbor would go overboard and stretch cotton stuffing between pillars on the porch to simulate a web and nestle a 6-inch plastic spider into the fiber. (Oooooo!) Now, Halloween seems to be challenging Christmas for retail holiday supremacy---8-foot inflatable spiders illuminated from the interior residing on the front lawn next to enormous hot-air Frankensteins and ghosts; orange and black strings of lights adorning the gutters of homes, hung from the same hooks that will hold red and green lights 6 weeks from now; full-size window silhouettes of witches, mummies, and (inexplicably) humans hanged at the neck. (That last one seems a little too scary---monsters can get an instant rise in adrenaline, but a gallows pole? That seems better suited for Wild West Day.) There were houses on my street that were so adorned with commercial spookiness that they rivaled the best "Haunted House" fund raisers of my memory. Glowing pumpkins on the porch barely qualifies as decoration anymore.
  
• Candy. Again, going back to my youth, we used to get candy bars---and I don't mean those puny little "Fun size" candy bars (what's so fun about that?), I mean candy bars: Full-size Clark bars, Butterfingers, The Holy Trinity (Three Musketeers, Snickers and Milky Way). For one night, sugar addicts rejoiced. Then came those "fun sizes", which were lame, but at least you could get two substantial bites from them. Lately I've witnessed the dawn of a smaller size, though I'm not sure what they call them: Micro bars? Doll candy? Cheapskate's delight? These little confections are not even half the size of the "fun size", so you don't even get to chew---it's like a futuristic simulation of eating a candy bar: "This is what a Milky Way would taste like if you ate an actual Milky Way." At our house, we can't look the posses of Spidermen and Shreks and Draculas in the eye without giving away at least two of the "fun size" bars (I'm still young enough to recall the disappointment of a lame Halloween handout), but some people give away these microscopic candy chunks one at a time, ensuring that if 200 kids come to their house, their entire cash outlay for the candy will not exceed $4.
  
• Costumes. But first, an aside: I have often pondered the inexplicable phenomenon that mustard has come in a squeeze bottle for 50 years, but as a kid ketchup only came in glass bottles. Mrs. Veysey recycled a squeeze mustard jar and filled it with ketchup, so I think the Veysey's were the only kids in the neighborhood who didn't have bruises on the heels of their hands during hotdog season due to hammering the bottle in order to get the product to flow. The glass ketchup sat next to the squeeze mustard on the picnic table for scores of years before someone finally realized what now seems obvious: a squeeze ketchup might be handy as well.
  The same logical disconnect occurred for years in the Halloween costume industry. When I was young, there was no insulation on a Halloween costume, as most of the pre-packaged Buck Rogers and Fireman outfits seemed to be made from leftover kite material. This meant layers of bulky clothing beneath the polyester fa�ade, or even worse, a jacket outside of the costume. (What kind of self-respecting space traveler wears a puffy down jacket over his gleaming silver space uniform?) But this is a new era of costumes for toddlers: cozy, zip-up insulated animal outfits. Sage's elephant suit was so warm and fuzzy that I wanted one for myself; Her cousin Owen's gorilla suit was comically adorable. I suppose it's just a matter of convenience (both animal costumes involved one zipper), or perhaps a scheme to allow the manufacturers to charge $15 for what used to sell for $5, but I don't care about the motive: Halloween costumes have come a long way, and it's about time.
  
• Parents---you might know that your 6-year old is dressed as a 60's Go-Go dancer, but take an objective look: If it is not perfectly clear that the plastic mini-skirt and fishnet stocking outfit did not come from a box labeled "Halloween Prostitute", don't send your girls out with it on. We witnessed such an outfit---in fact, a trio of pre-teen girls all in similar regalia---and they were creepy. (And I don't mean the good, Halloween creepy; I mean pedophile-fantasy creepy.) Perhaps they were dressed as Britney Spears, perhaps the three of them were a make-shift Charlie's Angels troupe, but even Charlie's Angels didn't wear fishnet stockings, so take those kids home, get them out of their pole-dancer-in-training outfits and dress them as princesses or tigers or something appropriate for their single-digit age bracket.
  

Halloween was very nice this year---Sage and Owen came home with, proportionate to their size, an enormous cache of candy; our jack-o-lanterns came out great, even if there was no Volkswagen-sized arachnid crawling over to devour them; we walked the sidewalks with friends and the dog (who was certainly curious about the parade of freaks wandering the streets that he usually has to himself in the evenings) and got to experience, for the first time, Halloween as one of those parents stationed on the sidewalk as their kids brave the long walk to the doorbell. It was a good start to Sage's holiday ritual.

After Sage went to bed, I sat eating too many miniature Twix bars, wondering: As she grows up and sees the outfits other kids are wearing, is she going to want to dress like those pixie latex queens? If so, I expect she's going to hate my costume suggestions---though I still think she'll make a lovely nun.

©2004 wpreagan