The princess and the tank engine
Halloween was my favorite "holiday" as a kid. Period. Sure, Christmas meant new toys, skiing in Tahoe, snowball fights, family, homemade candy, and weeks away from school ... okay, Christmas was my favorite holiday, but Halloween was a close second. There was just something about haunted houses, ghosts, skeletons, dungeons, graveyards, trick-or-treating, and all things scary, dark and mysterious that appealed to me.
I was a little eccentric in that my favorite costume was the $1.99 skeleton outfit that could be purchased at your Thrifty Drug and Discount store. You know the one -- the cheap plastic skull mask and black smock with the skeleton imprint that tied loosely in the back. Many of my friends' mothers spent days or weeks making their costumes, but I could never understand why anyone would wish to be Money Man, Cinderella, The Great Pumpkin, Superman, or the like, no matter how nicely executed the costume, when for a mere two bucks one could be a skeleton. What the hell did Cinderella have over a skeleton?! Suffice to say I never won a costume contest at school or elsewhere, but I stuck by the skeleton costume for years, long after my brothers were proudly wearing my mother's creations (and winning contests).
In any case, the macabre and the gothic still appeal to me, but at some point in my early teens Halloween fell out of favor. It likely happened a year or two after I'd stopped trick-or-treating, about the time I realized that throwing eggs at cars and other teens wasn't all that smart. I rarely celebrated Halloween in my twenties and thirties, but now that I have two small children, ages 4.5 and 2.5, and get caught up in their excitement when we talk about ghosts, skeletons, and candy, the memories come flooding back. My daughter will be a Snow Princess and my son will be Thomas the Tank Engine this year, and part of me wishes I could don the ol' skeleton one more time, just to feel the way my two children do now. Have a safe Halloween!
I was a little eccentric in that my favorite costume was the $1.99 skeleton outfit that could be purchased at your Thrifty Drug and Discount store. You know the one -- the cheap plastic skull mask and black smock with the skeleton imprint that tied loosely in the back. Many of my friends' mothers spent days or weeks making their costumes, but I could never understand why anyone would wish to be Money Man, Cinderella, The Great Pumpkin, Superman, or the like, no matter how nicely executed the costume, when for a mere two bucks one could be a skeleton. What the hell did Cinderella have over a skeleton?! Suffice to say I never won a costume contest at school or elsewhere, but I stuck by the skeleton costume for years, long after my brothers were proudly wearing my mother's creations (and winning contests).
In any case, the macabre and the gothic still appeal to me, but at some point in my early teens Halloween fell out of favor. It likely happened a year or two after I'd stopped trick-or-treating, about the time I realized that throwing eggs at cars and other teens wasn't all that smart. I rarely celebrated Halloween in my twenties and thirties, but now that I have two small children, ages 4.5 and 2.5, and get caught up in their excitement when we talk about ghosts, skeletons, and candy, the memories come flooding back. My daughter will be a Snow Princess and my son will be Thomas the Tank Engine this year, and part of me wishes I could don the ol' skeleton one more time, just to feel the way my two children do now. Have a safe Halloween!
posted by Mark Drury at 2:25 PM
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