As the kiddies start planning their character costumes without forethought of how or where they’ll come from, let’s not forget what the holiday is really about – sugar. Photo: Pexels (Charles Parker).
Like it or lump it, Halloween has arrived in Australia.
Despite the valiant efforts of curmudgeons everywhere, kids love lollies and retailers love to make money, so here we are!
Tired from the daily battleground that is parenting, I have accepted my fate on this front. However, if we’re retreating, let’s at least dictate the terms of our surrender.
We’ve started addressing the environmental impacts of decor, such as synthetic spiderwebs, and we all know the waste generated by single-serve packaged food.
Here’s my addition: Normalise sub-par dress-ups.
I’d like to see us embrace the homemade bodge job, rather than feeling coerced into the purchase of perfect (and pricey) store-bought costumes every year.
Whenever Halloween/Book Week/Dress-as-your-favourite-whatever Days rear their heads, parents brace themselves and say a little prayer that their kid isn’t feeling too inspired.
Sometimes you get lucky. Your kid wants to be a witch? Wear black, tease the hair, and you’re done. A mummy? Grab the toilet paper and prepare to get dizzy. Or – the holy grail – a ghost. Ah, now that’s the dream.
Other times (read: most times), your child is wild with excitement to transform themselves into a super-specific TV or movie character, who – of course – comes with a unique colour palette, a tonne of iconic props and possibly a sidekick animal.
Here are your options: Jump online, send $60 to a billionaire, and the problem goes away tomorrow; or suddenly become a super-talented artisan, sift through the recycling bin and create a literal miracle using nothing but a cardboard box, an egg carton and a roll of twine.
Neither of those options sounds appealing to me.
Though frankly, neither does the whole framework of Halloween.
We spend a summer evening – typically in daylight, making it more ‘sweltering’ than ‘spooky’ – trailing along behind a crazed hoard of opportunistic little sugar-addicts frantic with greed. We encourage them to approach and effectively threaten strange adults until they are rewarded with treats, before eventually the children collapse into an over-stimulated mess as they begin to experience their first hangover.
And voila! Just like the end of every Scooby Doo episode ever, the mask comes off and it’s revealed. It’s me – I was the curmudgeon all along!
“And I would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for you meddling kids!”
Though Halloween has appeared in our midst and is now taking solid form, this year I’m exorcising what little power I have – by acknowledging and avoiding the blatant commercial interests.
I will donate my time and hairspray to coiffing iconic looks. I will face paint like Picasso (well, hopefully better). I will spend the entire evening picking up lolly wrappers, managing meltdowns, and repeating ‘Say thank yoooooou!’ approximately 12,000 times.
But I will not send money to billionaires this Halloween.
Children don’t need store-bought costumes to dress up every Halloween. We’re not shooting a feature film. This is not a historical re-enactment. All they require is imagination and the ability to cheerfully announce “I’m a KPop Demon Hunter!” before they make off with their bounty.
Nobody cares whether they look like a perfect replica of a commercial character or like victims of a malicious episode of Art Attack.
And for the most part, the kids don’t care either.
They are among their pack, running wild in the streets, with a bucket full of sugar and no set bedtime. They’re not thinking about whether their costume is ‘on brand’ or whether their props are authentic reproductions. They’re so high they’ve forgotten they even have a body.
And look, I’ll remove my halo (homemade with pipecleaners, of course) long enough to admit – I’ve made plenty of Hail Mary Amazon orders and last-minute trips to K-Mart before, and I’m 100 per cent sure I’ll do it again.
But if Halloween is here to stay, I’d like to think that we can at least avoid solidifying yet another annual donation to retail in our calendars.
So for this year, I’m enjoying my illusion of power. Sorry, kids, I will not help send Katy Perry into space so that you can look like an authentic genie for three hours.
Halloween may have won the war and the battle, but I will die on this hill.
