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Day Three Hundred and Four:  My Halloween Pickle

The thing about my confusing issue with Halloween began one Christmas probably eighteen years ago.  My grandparents were taking me to the evening parade as my parents were in it in the small town where I grew up.  My mom had come around wearing an elf costume with a large bear and told me the bear was my father.  Um, no, that’s a bear.  She said it was my dad and he tried to hug me, and I wouldn’t let him.  I didn’t like that he didn’t look the way he really was.

Fast forward two years to my Auntie’s bedroom when I was five, we were watching Barney, and she asked me what Barney was.  I said he was a large purple friendly dinosaur but there was a man on the inside making him work.  My Auntie asked how I knew he wasn’t a real dinosaur, and I didn’t know.  These two very vivid instances in my mind are the reason I cannot go to football games, parades, or the mall around Christmas time because I have an issue with hugging people when they are in full-parodic costume.  Mascots freighten me, Santa’s in the mall freak me out, but here’s the catch:  If they’re on stage it’s fine.

It is something about knowing and being for sure about the understanding that when someone is on stage they are intentionally pretending to be whoever they’re dressed up as, and that’s okay with me.  They acknowledge that they are something different elsewhere and that’s what makes stage work okay.  It’s the parading around in a costume, interacting with civilians, and refusing to come out as your own true self.  Maybe I’m just in the business of understanding identity.

So you can understand my “pickle” as it is with Halloween.  I have nightmares already let alone  the reality issues that comes with an over-active imagination.  So when children and people of all ages are encouraged to frolic around neighbourhoods dressed up as varying degree’s of terror it’s hard to believe that I’m not a fan, right?  The reality (I think) of this whole deal is is that I love being scared, but I have an issue not understanding the blurred lines of pretend and reality on evenings like tonight.  I love handing out candy, I love clever, cosy costumes.  I love cosplay and all kinds of traditions that I have in my family but it’s the scary bits that get to me.  That’s why I haven’t dressed up as anything scary since I was… I was Sharon Osborne in like seventh grade, does that count?

However you celebrate Halloween let it be sitting in your bedroom watching Ferris Beuller’s Day Off with a box of chocolates (like me), hitting up a party dressed however you’d like or following kidlets around collecting candy I hope that tonight is what you hope it to be.  I think I’m spending the night in with my Judith and we are going to eat chocolate and watch a film.  On nights like these it’s easy to get away with a box of chocolates, right?

Happy Halloween!

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