Halloweenie

So, with 3 kids around here, Halloween has become kind of a big deal. But I have to ask, when did this one night of gluttonous semi-organized childhood beseeching for candy become a money-sucking week-long festival of greed celebrating all the bad things about capitalism? The intricate costumes, the 14 parties, the hoochie teen girls (and women well beyond the hoochie stage but letting it all hang out - literally - anyway)the over-the-top decorations. It's a little much for what used to be Christmas' plainer stepsister. It's like she's trying too hard to fit into the glass slipper and we're all paying for it.

When I was a kid, oh so long ago, Halloween was still a big deal for us kids, but the intercultural conflicts with my parents dulled the day. There was no pumpkin carving, no apple-bobbing, except maybe at school, and even trick-or-treating the first few years was a bit of a political stand-off between me and the rents. Having left an impoverished country with nothing but their honour, they could not get their heads around their middle-class child begging strangers for candy - and neighbours no less! Where they came from, begging was your last resort when you were too hungry to care about your pride. To their credit, they eventually got on board and allowed my brother and me to go around our block with our older cousins, who had fought and won that battle with their own parents a few years before us.

Oh, how I coveted the princess costumes, the Marie Osmond filmy satin dresses, those adorable home-made pumpkin costumes. My mother caved and bought me a plastic Wonder Woman Costume in kindergarten, which I was forced to wear for three years in a row, even though it was literally plastic - like flammable - with a hard plastic mask I could barely see out of, let alone breathe out of properly. But I knew better than to complain. The beautiful costumes were for the beautiful girls and I made do with my plastic Woolco costume until I was 8 and it split down the middle when I tried to wear it for our afternoon Halloween Parade at school. My butt's always been my problem area.

Devestated, I cried - oh, how I cried. I refused to go to school without a costume because I knew I would be made to sit in the library with the Jehovah's Witness kids who didn't celebrate anything. This was, after all, the early 80s when we still said the Lord's Prayer in class and when Muslim boys were Wisemen in the Christmas plays. We weren't quite so enlightened then, having orange-and-black parties instead of Halloween parties. Anyway, my father, home for lunch, improvised for me afer seeing my devestation. He found an old polyester maternity dress of my mother's and wrapped one of his belts around the middle. He took a couple of my mother's curlers and put them askew in my hair. He then proceeded to rub his fingers in some of the leftover ash in the ashtray that sat perpetually on the kitchen table in front of his chair, and then smudged it onto my nose and under my eyes.

"There!" he said, obviously proud of his ingenuity, a trait he no doubt refined ducking into fox traps on his way to school during Greece's civil war. "You can go to school as a battered housewife!"

This was 1981, a good three years before Farrah Fawcett's starring turn in "The Burning Bed" brought the horrors of domestic abuse to light for millions of North Americans. This was a good 10 years before the raising of my own feminist consciousness. This seemed like a great idea - a home-made costume! A chance to go to the party!

I proudly paraded through my elementary school and noticed only a few raised eyebrows when I would enthusiastically explain my costume to the teachers who asked what I was. Thank God we were out of film for the Polaroid and there is no photographic evidence.

It was a simpler time, a time when we were truly grateful for the dredges of our immigrant parents' attention to our desires.

Flashforward to now. My kids have also never had a hand-made costume, unless it was one passed down to them from a craftier friend. The baby is going as Woody from "Toy Story" and though I suspect his costume is still quite flamable, at least it's fabric and fits him. The first born had several good years as the princess of her dreams - a different princess every year, no less. This year she is going as a "cute" ladybug, which means ladybug costume with lipstick and painted nails, signs of the hoochie just waiting to come out in a few years' time. Middle child is trick-or-treating as a peacekeeper - we prefer that to "army killer guy." He chose to go to school as a punk rock vampire because the peacekeeper costume with no weapons just wouldn't do. So, at lunch today, I lined his eyes with black eyeliner, gave him black lips, gelled his hair blue and stuck a paper clip to his earlobe. He looked like a way prettier version of Robert Smith from The Cure. We improvised because it was last minute and had to use stuff like ripped jeans and a plain black T-shirt since I'm not the kind of mom who will drop her plans for morning coffee with friends to go buy a second Halloween costume just to make her kid happy. But he was pleased and proud and got loads of compliments on his goth look.

So, maybe there's more of my dad in me than I thought.

Happy Halloween!