Helloween

When I was a kid, halloween was a miserable holiday.  It induced near-panic attacks.  Living in northwest Missouri almost guaranteed shitty weather.  In addition to freezing my ass off, I always had a really lame costume.  I think this is mostly because my parents are cheap and lazy.  I always had great ideas for costumes, but it always seemed cost prohibitive.  My folks were not lacking in creativity, that's for sure.  All the tales of impending doom at the dentist's office, how awful sex was, mostly just warnings given with a "if you do this, something bad will happen" sort of flavor.

I had a few classmates who's moms could sew and they came out with these great costumes!  My mom could sew...   I so longed for something neat to wear on halloween, but the best costume I ever ended up with was a black garbage bag stuffed with other garbage bags, holes cut out for the eyes, and big plastic sunglasses.  Guess what I was?  Give up?  A California raisin.  Boo.

The worst costumes were the ones that they actually bought for us.  The plastic suits that had the brittle plastic masks.  Most of these characters were super heros or cartoon characters (most of which I didn't give a shit about).  It doesn't really sound that bad, but let me tell you something, those masks were their own kind of torture.  Two sharp little holes stamped for your nose and one strange little slit where your mouth was.

Jogging from house to house only generated a disgusting condensation inside the mask.  Someone always had a cold, so imagine a running nose, hot breath, and lots of slobber.  My parents were too cheap to buy new costumes every year, so it was a real drag to have to wear my sister's slobber mask from last year.  After a full night of heavy breathing under one of those, they never smelled the same.  It makes me gag a little right now just thinking about it.

I guess the most damaging part of my childhood halloween was the fact that my parents sat in the car and would not let us stop till they were done.  They would drop us off to send us up and down a street, when we returned to the car, they would take our buckets, dump them in theirs and tell us to take the next street.  All the while, they dug through our loot and took the candy bars (the big ones--the days before "fun size"). We would get left with the dry popcorn balls that the old ladies made, those horrible peanut butter taffies in the black or orange wax paper, and tootsie rolls (which aren't that bad, but certainly not great when you know you got a full-sized Snickers bar you'll never get to eat).  My parents are such assholes.  They laughed and pushed us onward the whole night.  I can remember several halloweens ended in tears for me.  I just didn't want to go on.  I couldn't wait for the day when I was finally too old to trick-or-treat.  I think 6th grade was my last trip out and I dressed myself in a skirt I found that was about 6 sizes too big and called myself a witch.  NO mask.

Now that we are adults, we can choose how we want to celebrate halloween, and celebrate we do!  Hubby and I make ridiculous costumes.  We have a costume party and pot-luck dinner every year that is so much fun....  the alcohol probably helps a little too.