Plus, Easter is always on a Sunday. I hate it when things are scheduled on Sundays, period, because that should just be my day to stare into space, unmolested.
Finally, any holiday that requires ham be served as its iconic meat is just not okay with me. If "Easter bacon" was a tradition, I could probably get on board. But ham is just wannabe bacon.
Give it up, ham.
Besides, it's hard to compete with my most-favorite holiday, which is Thanksgiving, because that holiday gives me time off of work, absolutely nothing to sew, bake, or create, permission to eat many salty foods, and I don't have to buy any gifts. The only requirement is that I eat too much, drink wine with friends, and sit down lots while my husband happily cooks. Totally ideal.
But Halloween is my second-least favorite holiday, after Easter, and here's why.
TOP FIVE REASONS I DON'T LIKE HALLOWEEN.
5. WORK. It's supposedly a "kids" holiday, but if you're a parent of youngish children, you know that you are required to do things for parties and prepare costumes and attend events, but you don't get the accompanying time off work. I know I should be cheerful that I get to participate in this ritual with my children--one that they absolutely adore, by the way--but you know what? Halloween always comes at the very busiest time of the semester, when I invariably have some sort of respiratory infection or pending conference travel, and when I feel my least cheerful. I'm a fan of the idealized 1970s version of Halloween parenting, where kids stole sheets from the linen closet to make their own costumes ("ghosts"/the KKK) and just roamed neighborhoods in great hooligan bands while parents stayed home, drank great quantities of sweet liquers, and were nasty to each other. This reality probably only exists in my head and Steven Spielberg movies, but I long for it anyway.
4. CANDY. This is not an anti-sugar diatribe. I love sugar. I eat it everyday, preferably in the form of ice cream. And most forms of candy I could give a rats' ass about: Starburst, Mike and Ikes, Smarties, blah. Who cares. Those would sit on my shelves gathering dust for millennia. But this kind of candy?
The chocolatey kind with peanut butter or nuts or toffee inside? I literally have no self-control around it. None. I had bronchitis this weekend so bad that the doctor told me if I tried to go to work yesterday she'd meet me at the hospital to treat my pneumonia, and I STILL ate 12 of these things. TWELVE. That's like six real candy bars. And I could have eaten more but my self-loathing finally kicked in. I could be throwing up Snickers and shoving them in my mouth simultaneously is how much I love these things.
And guess what else is effed up: we won't even be home to hand these out to trick or treaters. So Eric bought these all for us to eat, on top of whatever we steal from the girls' bowls.
Who does that.
3. DECORATIONS. I have a complicated relationship with stuff, okay? Our house is on the cluttered side of things, and I've inherited all sorts of "treasures" from my family that I find hard to give up, and I love clothes and shoes. But I also do not like having a bunch of unused stuff around that has to be stored. Ski clothes and holiday decorations fall into this category, and are frequently donated to the thrift store every year in a purge, then repurchased every year in a guilt-fueled binge. We are perpetually cold in the winter and always shabbily under-decorated. Because I feel so cranky about Easter and Halloween, in fact, I do not decorate for these holidays at all.
This makes my children sad. In their minds, our house should be decorated in orange lights and drop-down spiders and fake webs and jack-o-lanterns. Instead, there are just moldy leaves in the front yard and the cracked, peeling concrete of our front steps.
I'm sorry kids.
It gets so bad that my normally bookish, tv-addicted children take matters into their own hands and decorate things themselves. Like this weekend, when they decided to make a scarecrow for the front yard.
Just to be clear, that IS a Cabbage Patch head peeking out there. And this IS on par with having a toilet in your yard as a "Christmas" decoration.
In case you can't appreciate the utter sadness:
2. HAVING TO DRESS UP. There are lots of funny memes and commentary going around about "sexy" women's Halloween costumes and we can all nod knowingly and get feminist-indignant about it, but frankly there IS kind of an art to killing it at Halloween, and I sort of admire both the sexy barmaids and the family that can show up as the entire cast of The Office as their gimmick. I am usually running around at 5:30 the night of the party we've been invited to trying to figure out what I am going to "be." And, surprise, it's never a sexy barmaid, because rarely are the makings of "sexy barmaid" just lying around in my recycling bin.
Also, let's be real. My sense of humor is a little off, yeah? One year, I thought it would be really funny to go as Octo-Mom, so I dressed up in a large shirt that I had sewn eight dolls' heads to. This made me laugh maniacally at myself while I was putting it together but when I tried to explain it to people at the party, they just half-grinned and moved away a little.
Another time, I was Hermione Granger but the wig was all wrong and I ended up looking like a cast member from Spinal Tap.
Please note that Eric actually looks like Harry Potter.
And then there was the year I was a Zombie Mariachi.
It pleases Eric to no end when I show up in such sexy costumery.
Anyway, my point is: some of us have the Halloween spirit, and some don't. I belong in one of those groups.
It's not the first one.
1. KIDS COSTUMES. Oh, what to say about this. I'm definitely not one of those moms who feels compelled to make her kids costumes, or to fanatically buy them, either, as some sort of statement about parenting. There have been years we've bought costumes off of Amazon, years we've raided the thrift store, and years I've made them. So this is not anxiety about source or procurement.
However: the first year Addie was in school I completely forgot that she would need a costume and had a real loud crying fit about whether or not I should have ever had children, and now I have PTSD about remembering or forgetting Halloween altogether. It should be obvious that my preference would be to forget it, but there is some decent part of me that knows that's not an okay option for my children.
And so I push the kids weeks, nay months, in advance to think about their costumes. I lock 'em in early. We try on costumes early. And then, when they want to change their minds the actual week of Halloween, we have very many large fights about it and I turn into monster mommy, my very favorite Halloween role.
This year, Addie wanted to be a zombie bride (apple, meet tree) so we tore up a sheet (Spielberg!) and she ended up like this:
Great, good.
Except it itched, of course, and necessitated much futzing and complaining and fighting. Awesome.
And Nolie wanted to be Cleopatra, which made me inwardly rejoice, because a few years ago Addie wanted to be a "Grecian Goddess," a costume which I actually sewed by my ownself with no pattern, and in my head I unilaterally decided to be culturally insensitive and historically inaccurate and lobbed Egyptian ruler and Grecian Goddess into the same category so that Nolie could wear Addie's old costume, currently balled up in the dress-up bin:
See the wrinkles? Cuz I wasn't about to iron that shit. Nope. Not on Halloween.
This makes me feel better about not carving pumpkins this year or having a costume planned. No time for that shit. However, at my grandmother's graveside service, I thought it would be funny to toss sheets over the toddling babies and have them run around like drunken ghosts. No one else found that funny. Not even a little.
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