THIS weekend, I’m no doubt going to be elbow-deep in fake blood and armed with a pair of scissors and a stapler as I try to fashion Halloween costumes for my own little ghouls.
For Delilah, I’m thinking a spooky Hermione from Harry Potter, repurposing an outfit we already have in the dressing-up box. For the boys, a Hulk outfit and princess dress can be terrifying, can’t they?
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I love any excuse for a gathering – and fancy dress. There’s always a buzz around our home as the kids get excited and muck in with decorating the house with spider webs and pumpkins.
My best friend usually throws a party and we go trick-or-treating together. Of course, we have rules – like no knocking on doors that don’t have a pumpkin, staying together, saying thank you – and obviously, to always feel around for the full-sized chocolate bars.
But truth be told, I’m torn when it comes to celebrating All Hallows’ Eve. As a child, I spent a lot of time with my grandparents, who were extremely religious and said Halloween just celebrated “evil”. It put a real dampener on things.
I was forbidden to partake in any aspect – dressing up, trick-or-treating or ghoulish parties. I was allowed to carve a pumpkin – as long as it was smiling sweetly. Once I got offered the chance to go to a Hallelujah Happening at the church hall, with hymns and homemade treats.
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As you can imagine, it just didn’t tick the boxes I craved, aged nine or ten. Sometimes at school, I’d make up events from my Halloween night to save myself from embarrassment over having done nothing.
As a teenager, I finally got a piece of the action because my friend’s birthday was on October 29, so she would have Halloween-themed parties where we would watch horror films.
The Exorcist, Chucky, It, Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer – watching them was a rite of passage, although I’m not sure how I’d feel about my teenager watching them.
Halloween was nowhere near as big or commercialised as it is now – with costumes that fill the supermarket aisles – and while I want my kids to be involved, I do have some concerns.
I don’t have the same issues my grandmother had, and certainly don’t think of trick-or-treating as “begging”, like she did. But do we really need to be dressing up our children as killers?
CUSHY JOB
You can now get paid £4k to wear slippers all day – and you to keep the pairs too
Make-believe ghosts, vampires, mummies or even Frankensteins are acceptable fancy-dress costumes but do we really need a baby with an axe through its head?
Some of the costumes have got out of hand. Don’t get me wrong, dressing up an angry baby as a pumpkin, or a dog as a huge spider, is cute. But gore is certainly not more when it comes to little ones.
