Halloween

Okay, Halloween is actually one of my favorite holidays, but there are a few things that I'm totally against.

1-Adults who dress up and go door to door and beg for candy. I will shut my door on adults who do that . . . especially college students. If you're going around with little ones, that is fine because you are escorting them and keeping them safe, but a bunch of older teens and young adults? Come on! You have money, go buy your own candy.

Now, I know that I dress up for charity events, and yes, I even dress up for Halloween, but I don't go out trick-or-treating anymore. Leave that aspect of Halloween to the younger kids. They have more fun anyway.

2-Christmas items in the store before Halloween or even thanksgiving. I get really miffed when I walk into the stores looking for fun and inexpensive Halloween decorations and I see the christmas stuff already up on display taking up half the store and all they have is a couple of shelves worth of Halloween stuff. There are two holidays before christmas for crying out loud! I think that if a store wants to have it's christmas stuff out, why don't they put it up somewhere in the back of the store and keep it there. It seems like that stuff is coming out earlier and earlier each year and Halloween and thanksgiving decorations come out a few weeks before the holiday and then disappear just a quickly as if retailers were ashamed of the goods.

3-Pets in "human" costumes. Those little costumes that have arms and only go over the animals front paws. I saw a dog that looked so miserable from that that I felt sorry for the little guy. I think it's great that people want to include their pet as part of the family--my cat sure thinks hes the head of the household--but they should have a bit of dignity. Give them a little coat or cover that still lets them be their selves, but don't try to make them look like the kids in the family.

4-People that see the need to smash or steal pumpkins. A friend of mine is an amazing pumpkin carver and hers really turn out like works of art . . . but very few people ever get to see them because she won't put them on her porch. A year or so ago, she had created a fantasy scene on her porch with carved pumpkins and it was truly amazing. Well, she left for the afternoon and when she arrived back home in the evening, half the display was gone. She found two or three in the road smashed to pieces. That evening as she was taking her kids around their trick-or-treating route, she heard some neighbors talking about a couple pumpkins on the porch of this one young man's house. He said that he had done all of them. She took a look and sure enough, there were her pumpkins. When she confronted the young man about it he was adamant that they were his, but my friend knew better. She signs all her pumpkins on the bottom and somewhere in the design. Those were hers.

My parents won't put pumpkins out of their steps anymore either. We've had them smashed in our rose garden, up against the side of the house, in the road, and on my car--which is not easy to get off once it's dried.

If people don't want to take the time or have the family activity of carving a pumpkin, then ask someone else if you can pay them to carve one for you or get one of the ones that has a face painted on it.

Now, getting to the real reason I wanted to write about Halloween. Commercials and advertisements have gone to two different extremes in my opinion. One extreme is that they dumb it down for the kids and tell them that they need a different and more expensive costume each year and that it has to be what they want not what their parents--most of the time--can afford. The other extreme is the sexualization of the costumes and accessories for the adults. I normally make all my costumes, but I've been busy this semester so I wasn't able to start on one, so when I had a bit of free time I decided to go looking for pieces to use or for a full costume that wasn't too expensive. What I found was a lot of short, skimpy costumes or some that didn't have any ethics behind it. I ended up going back to the safety of the poodle skirt, although I didn't wear it all day.

I'm not a big fan of the macabre portion of Halloween or at least what some members of the general public make of it. I was watching CNN a few nights ago and this guy had gotten in trouble for hanging nooses and then dummys from his house. He saw nothing wrong in it, but I think that it is the wrong message to be sending to today's youth. In a world where there is so much death and violence, things like nooses and knives sticking through chests or heads isn't needed. All I need to do on any given day is turn on the news.

I'm all for the fun aspect that Halloween and its decorations can become. A few friends and I are in the planning stages for a haunted house, but we aren't putting anything that could have a negative effect on the youth of today.