Happy Halloween

I have fond memories of going trick-or-treating with my brother and friends on Halloween. We used to get doubly excited when it happened to fall on a Friday or on a weekend because that meant that we could stay out a bit later and get some extra candy. Then for the next few weeks we would spend time going through our candy, savoring the things we liked, getting rid of the things we didn't. Since I'm allergic to peanuts, my brother would take pity on my and trade me a lot of my peanut candies for non-peanut candies he collected. That used to be our big thing, just trading back and forth and then enjoying the fruits of our begging...er... labor in having collected the candy.

Like most kids out there we wanted to dress up in costumes of people and characters that meant a lot to us or that we admired. I remember dressing up as Luke Skywalker (you knew Star Wars had to come in somewhere) in one of those old plastic suits which resembled one of the costumes and had a plastic mask that covered the face. You'd wear those for a few years and then realize you didn't want to walk around roasting in plastic suit but would prefer to wear and actual costume. We did the same thing, we began getting our own accessories and making up our own costumes. We continued to wear costumes of people we had seen in the movies or somewhere else but our parents always made sure that they were tasteful or proper emulations.

What do I mean by that? Well one Halloween I remember wanting to be an astronaut since my parents had bought me a flightsuit similar to the one astronauts on the shuttle used to wear when we had gone down to Florida. Some days later when we went to the store to buy some candy to hand out I spied a Freddy Krueger glove and it just seemed to 'call' to me. I was convinced I had to have it. I tried to convince my mom of it too but she just wouldn't have it. Given that I didn't have an allowance at the time didn't help my case either since I couldn't pay for it myself. She told me over and over again about how she didn't want me to mix up a good costume with a bad one. I didn't understand it much at the time but I do now.

I think it's important for kids to have characters or people they look up to and wish to emulate. I think it helps to steer them in a direction that will let them have a successful future. My mom's arguement against my having a plastic knife laden Freddy Krueger glove was not only due to the fact that no astronaut has, up to this point, worn anything resembling this item and it would just mess the look of the costume but more importantly, Freddy Krueger was a killer. Sure you can argue that he was a killer in the movies and not really a killer in real life but if you think about it, doesn't it make sense that he should be shunned and not idolized? There's a difference between wanting to simply dress up as someone and idolizing them. I think the older you get the easier it is to figure out but not always.

It's probably the best thing that I could have learned that Halloween and though in the ensuing years I did have a wide variety of costumes that were either scary or representative of someone or something, I don't think I ever came close to portraying a 'killer' ever again. You can say that it's a bit too deep to think about when you're talking about something fun like Halloween but you never know how great an impact it can have on someone. I'm something of a nut on History anyways but when I dressed up as a pirate one Halloween it spurned me to read and learn more about who I was portraying and that whole era. I'm not saying that we should all take efforts to make Halloween a learning experience but we should make it a safe and sane one.