Hallowe’en is my favourite holiday, balanced by Thanksgiving and New Year. I was up late at a pretty dull party, and up early for a long, slow breakfast with a lumbering behemoth of a group (my cousin’s bicycle activist tour coworkers), and now I am too tired to make witty paragraphs. It’s a list format day.
Highlights from my adventures as Bride of Frankenstein:
- So that’s how you use Tupperware to build tall hairstyles…
- Galen’s great-aunt: “So dear, you’re a ‘goth,’ aren’t you?”
- More great-aunt: “How did you get your hair so tall?” (Making me feel suddenly awkward because her everyday hairstyle is a beehive variant and I wasn’t sure whether she thought mine was ridiculous or not.)
- Dragging the hem of my white dress in puddles and mud on purpose, because it was only a bedsheet.
- Still having gray streaks in my temples at breakfast today, and getting to talk to our waiter about it. He still had metallic green fingernails from a Satan costume. We said one sentence each, I think, but I liked it. He was a good waiter. I might have had a 5-minute crush on him.
And of this Hallowe’en in general:
- Mistaking Rebecca for a couch twice, instead of recognizing the back of her California Raisin get-up.
- Walking around having serious conversations about work and responsibility and taking charge, and being taken by the snippets that passing pedestrians must have heard coming out of that Raisin, with her huge aqua-rimmed sunglasses.
- The whole city smelled like brussel sprouts. Probably from fireworks? Hopefully from some anti-loitering stink-bomb we imagined the city bureaucrats setting off.
- So many fireworks going off. I love the spectacle, but this year I was actually moved by the way pretend-bombs emphasize the absurdly peaceful and neighbourhoodly place I live. (Bang!… no flinching. “I’m sure that’s fine.”)
The whole reason I like Halloween is for the costumes. I can’t come up with a reason that costumes are important or worth a holiday, but I stand by Halloween. New Year’s I like for the cyclical celebration, and Thanksgiving because gratitude is one of the few things I practice in what could be considered a spiritual way. That one actually is important. But the costumes!