Ahhhh, Halloween. A pagan Celtic holiday (Samhain, look it up on Google) that was stolen, bastardized, dumbed down, and sissied up by the Christians, and fed to us as the eve of All Saints Day. Your particular patron saint not cool enough to get his own day? Well, November 1st takes care of that! It’s for all the saints!!! Oddly, though, the only two saints I can think of who have their own day, Patrick and Andrew, were Celtic…the patron saints of Ireland and Scotland respectively….Valentine doesn’t really count since no one’s entirely sure which martyred Valentinus of Rome is to be venerated… but I digress.
As a kid, you looked forward to Halloween night to go traipsing about clad in some cool outfit or other, getting bagfuls of loot. Each year it gets tamer and safer too, it seems. We wore cheap, shitty thin plastic masks held tight to our faces by a cheap elastic which often broke off the mask. The eye holes were never quite right and poked you in the eyes with bits sticking out. The suit was so flammable that it would ignite if you stood too close to a light bulb. Later, we graduated to hot, suffocating rubber masks that smelled like formaldehyde and collected water from sweat and breath condensation. If our faces were painted, it was with toxic paints like lead yellow and mercury silver.
As a teen, you were considered a douchebag if you went trick or treating after age 12, so instead you either sat at home waiting to steal your siblings’ candy, or stuck passing out the crap your parents bought to the neighborhood kids at the door, or being a vandalizing asshat and egging people’s houses or throwing rolls of toilet paper into trees of people who’d slighted you.
Nowadays they start trick or treating a couple days beforehand like beggars, they trick or treat at hospitals and shopping malls, and costumes are all biodegradeable earth-friendly green generic advertisements for toys and video games.
What the hell happened to Halloween?
I mean, sure, it’s for kids, but as an adult you sort of expect to go to some big shindig party with guests garbed in the sort of outlandishly creative costumes that they came up with on the annual “Roseanne” Halloween episode. However, I think I’ve been to perhaps one not-very-exciting home-based party in my adult years, one decent party one , and have spent about 4 or 5 Halloweens at bars or dance clubs to participate in their parties. And if I’ve learned anything at all from going to an overcrowded club full of Halloween revelers, it’s this: the bulk of humanity lacks creativity and relies on the lowest common denominator.
Sex, not scary, is the lowest common denominator of Halloween. The next lowest would be “stupid”. Having visited no fewer than three local full-scale Halloween stores this season, and searched about five or six costume retail websites, I came to the conclusion that all adult womens’ costumes are intended to be slutty and whorish versions of costumes they wore as kids, and guys’ costumes are intended to either be buffoonishly dumb or sophomorically penile. When you run out of creativity, fall back on showing off your tits, or making a dick joke.
Naughty schoolgirl, naughty cave-girl, naughty princess, naughty vampire, naughty nurse, naughty this and naughty that…and the ubiquitous matched sets of pimps and hoes. Of course, the bars & clubs jump on the bandwagon by sponsoring “Heaven & Hell” nights for “naughty angels and sexy devils”, and “Pimps & Hoes Parties” by where guys dress like a pimp and girls dress like they normally do for a night out of free drinks from dumbasses; ie: like hoes. I’ve even heard it done as “Vicars and Vixens”, by where the men dress as priests and the women are slutty nuns or just plain slutty anythings. Lovely.
We went to a Halloween party on Friday night a couple miles away from our house, and I went as a hockey player with a throat wound and Crys went as serial killer Aileen Wournos. Tacky, yes, I know. But the crowd at the party got the joke, and everyone there, with the notable exception of one exceptionally drunk fellow who stayed the night there, was in costume. Mostly it was a traditional collection of zombies and gothic scaries, and absolutely NO ONE was dressed in anything whorish or dickish. It was quite refreshing, actually.
Look, people, Halloween comes but once a year. Spend a little time & effort and donate some creativity to the event if you’re gonna participate. Don’t be a doofus in a dick suit or just another skank in a teddy. And while we’re at it, please skip the “Scream” masks and Jason Vorhees-style goalie masks. Those are played out too. Again, show some creativity. The best costume of the night Friday was the guy who made his own “Pyramid Head” helmet, from the video game/movie “Silent Hill”. The guy did an incredible job welding together the façade on top of a construction helmet, and while I had no idea what the hell a Pyramid Head was at the time, it looked really cool.
Creativity is a good thing, people…utilize it. Or Pyramid Head will come after you with his giant butter knife...
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