halloween

Halloween is a strange holiday. Actually, it isn't even a holiday; it's an excuse to dress like a hooker and eat lots of sugar, all in the name of ??? Yea...weird. The reason I'm hating on halloween is because I had no plans so it's convenient to pull the "I didn't want to participate" line.
Halloween has always been a bit of a crapshoot in our family. When we were little, halloween always seemed to sneak up on us so quickly that we were left with 24 hours to come up with a costume. This usually limited our options to clothing already in our house (translation: mom and dad's clothes & some reject costumes from earlier years). My mom's favorite last minute costume? Gypsy. Going as a gypsy was easy because all we had to do was wear lots of ratty looking clothing and wear too much makeup. But after more than 3 appearances as a gypsy...we had to draw the line. Second place outfit? The infamous black cat. Black outfit (teenager = miniskirt, make-up, heels & the obligatory angst, innocent child = Laura Ashley jumper, mary janes, and furry gloves), a set of black, pointy ears and black eyeliner whiskers on your cheeks. Third place outfit? Witch. I pulled this one a lot, but I never had black robes so I just wore one of my mom's black dresses and put on the crooked pointy hat that was always stuffed in our "dress up" chest. The dress up chest was full of the most fabulously random things: grass skirts, hot pink tutus, a witch's hat, a bizarre unitard with a sewn on squirrel tail (it was for the play Chicken Little. I was a squirrel, which wasn't a character in the play, but after they cast me as a daisy, I asked if I could be a squirrel instead. I only had 1 line so they didn't care if I was a rodent or a flower), a red cape with faux white fur fringe (when needing to be a king naturally), several sparkling crowns (worn by us and regrettably, by our dogs), and a beautiful egyptian head piece that we always wanted to wear but never had the right outfit for. We tried doing the whole "trick-or-treating in your own neighborhood" thing, but the houses were too spread out, so our mom drove us from house to house and needless to say, many of the doors we knocked on either never opened or opened to a very shocked resident (and it wasn't because of our smashing costumes). We eventually started doing trick-or-treating with our friends in more populated areas, which was great. But the funny thing is, you collect all this candy, go home, stuff your face, and feel totally nuts for the rest of the night and wake up the next morning to find your candy stash mysteriously missing...You ask your mom and she looks down at you with that deceitful innocence as she makes you some breakfast and then quickly changes the subject or says something like, "didn't you eat it all?"
No, you say to yourself, I most certainly did not, and I was fully intending to go crazy again tonight and dress up as an egyptian king and sing songs from The Sound of Music at the top of my lungs! (this is about the time you realize why your mother would do such a horrible thing to you)...