Halloween I
Dressing kids up as a goblin or a ghoul every year is a pretty good racket the merchandising companies have going on. When I was in the business, every year around July 4th, about fifty pallets of Halloween merchandise showed up on my back dock with no instructions as to what to do with the stuff for the next four months. Sure, I did what any normal stock guy would do, I displayed it as soon as space became available, but nobody wants a Freddy Krueger mask in August.
None of the costumes cost less than twenty bucks and all the knick knacks and lights (where the hell did those things come from?) will run you anywhere from ten bucks to however ritzy you want to go on your yard decorations. Speaking of that, when the hell did all this yard decoration crap become trendy? Back when I was a kid, people put a few pumpkins out, and at the most extreme, somebody might have a smoke machine hidden in the bushes. It’s as if somebody were trying to make another Christmas type holiday in hopes of driving sales…
Eighty percent of all the big box types of stores sales come between the months of October and January. That’s right, in those four months, they pay for the rest of the year…anything to stretch those sales out just a bit more is gravy on the biscuit. Holidays like Secretary’s day, Sweetest day, and Bosses day are all bullshit holidays designed by the industry to milk any more dollars you have in your pocket. In addition, the guilt involved in those holidays almost make it as if you have to do something, or look like a schmuck if you don’t.
Now, holidays like Easter, Valentine’s, and Halloween are getting the treatment; as if they weren’t “spendy” enough already.
Twenty years ago, nobody ever thought to string bright Easter lights up in their bushes or decorate their office with Valentine’s day streamers. It just wasn’t done, but these days if you don’t do that sort of thing, and it is expected, you are either a scrooge or you are too cheap to do it and obviously a bastard anyways. More guilt.
I have just gotten home from spending a grueling two hours looking for Halloween costumes for my boy and girl. My boy wants to be Indiana Jones this year and my girl didn’t care what she was as long as it was something beautiful. Beautiful? Whatever happened to going out as some sort of spooky vampire or a troll or a God, just anything other than a slutty outfit…more on that later.
The Indiana Jones costume was easy enough, this year an Indy movie came out and the shelves were literally crawling with whips, fedora’s, and fake snakes. The only problem was that the costumes were more expensive than a three-day weekend in a Vegas brothel. I couldn’t find anything under forty bucks, and sorry, I don’t care how rich you are, you don’t spend forty bucks on a costume that the kid is only going to wear for about two hours, in the dark, running around in the underbrush, if you do, you need your head checked. I opted for using my head this year and decided to just buy some khaki pants and a white shirt for the boy. He could wear those clothes year round and their total came in at just under twenty bucks. The fedora and the whip I bought at a costume store and so the total came to around thirty bucks. Yeah, I only saved ten dollars and I had to go to the hassle of doing things the way I did, but my boy got a new school outfit out of the deal, so I don’t feel like such a sucker.
Now the beautiful costume had me at a loss. I am not a “beautiful” type of person and it baffles me when my daughter wants trendy “girl things.” I don’t withhold those things, I just don’t understand them; give me a cap gun and a pack of comic books and I am fine…no, I am contented, calm, and happy.
Since we waited until the last minute to decide what was beautiful, we had some slim pickens to look through at the local costume seller. There were Snow White outfits, Pocahontas dresses and my personal favorite, the Wicked Witch of the West. We weren’t going to be buying that one despite my protests. Amid all of those more traditional costumes, there were tons of what I like to call the “slutty outfits.”
I don’t know about you, but I do not think that an eleven-year old girl needs to go trick or treating dressed as a devil girl in an outfit that has the backside wedged so far up her crack it looks like she will need the proctologist to enjoy her candy later. That kind of outfit is better suited for the drunken sorority chick that needs it as another excuse to dress up like a hooker. No, I was going to go with childhood on this one, not some “HOT zombie” outfit—the bag that held the costume actually said that under a picture of a porn star in white make-up and an Elvira wig. She’s still a kid and I know how precious that is (even if she does not), and I am going to force her to be one for as long as she (and I) can get away with it.
So we bought the pretty princess outfit and a nice wig. I was happy, she was happy, and I am sure that the fact that she isn’t showing midriff will have no direct effect on her total candy haul for the evening. On the drive home, I tried to convince her to let my “spooky up” the costume by getting her some fake blood, vampire teeth, and some death make-up, but no she wasn’t having any of that. She wanted to be beautiful…so that’s what is going to happen.
Now I am eagerly waiting for somebody to remember that we haven’t bought a pumpkin to carve yet. I think I will do that tomorrow when the kids are at their Halloween pageant at school. More on that later.
