It's getting close to Halloween; that amazing holiday where you get to wear a costume and gorge yourself on candy. Basically, it's a kid's dream come true. I can remember back when I was really little, I loved it. My mom always made the costumes for me and my brother and sister and they were always amazing: Rainbow Brite, a dinosaur, a skunk, a spider, Ninja Turtles, fairies, Dorothy . . . You name it, she could make it.
But somewhere along the way, way too early, Halloween stopped being fun for me. I guess around age 10, I developed this massive anxiety about having to pick what I was going to be for Halloween. I don't really know why. Sure, it only came around once a year so you wanted to pick something good, but it got to the point where I couldn't pick ANYTHING. I know it had to be frustrating for my mom since she had three costumes to make and my indecision wasn't making life any easier, but I started to hate Halloween. I remember one year I was huddled in my closet, crying, an hour before everyone was supposed to show up for our Halloween party because I didn't know what I wanted to be and I knew there wasn't any time to make me a costume anyway.* It was horrible.
This decision paralysis ended up leading to a lot of costumes for me that were along the lines of "a boy." Stuff that could be thrown together at the last minute but that I was never really happy with. The gleaming exception here is the year I went as "an accident-prone kid."** The moms loved it and I got TONS of candy.
But I still don't know why I got so uptight about Halloween when I was a kid. The entire holiday is just about having fun (or now it is anyway). I quit trick-or-treating whenever my sister did, so I guess I was 12. I just wanted to stay home and eat candy without having to dress up to get it. And I haven't dressed up for a single Halloween since then.
And the thing is, I want to. Come on, how fun is it to put on some ridiculous or scary outfit that you'd never normally wear? But I could still never think of what to be. (Plus I would have had to go hunt down a costume party, but it's not like that would have been hard if I tried at all.) Now I feel like there's this additional pressure to not only have a good costume, but one that's clever too. Although that's probably just because the costumes I'm most impressed with are the ones that're clever or have some kind of a twist to them.
This year I'm breaking that streak of not dressing up! And I'm pretty excited about it. I thought of a costume that was moderately clever, but then a bunch of my friends decided to get together as an ensemble and I'm jumping in with them on that. I feel like I'm reclaiming those years I wasted as a kid stressing out about what I was going to be when I should have just picked something and focused on having fun. Isn't that really what Halloween's about? Well, that and giving kids a three day sugar-high.
Sometimes I just need to tell myself to relax. I'm going to party with my friends over the weekend and buy myself some candy to eat while watching something (moderately) scary on Halloween night. That sounds like an excellent plan to me. And I didn't even cry in the closet, I'm such a big girl.
*I ended up being wedged into an old costume of my brother's (a spider with a bowtie).
** Easiest costume ever: Put your arm in a sling, black out your two front teeth with a Reese's wrapper, and use face paint to add a black eye and some stitches.
No comments:
Post a Comment