5. The History – if you want to do something vastly
entertaining on Halloween approach 2 grad students (any major will do
but history and theology are the most diverting) and start asking about
the origins of Halloween and which religions
it’s based in. They’ll get into a huge stinky argument that you can
laugh at for a couple of hours. The origins and history of Halloween are
tied up in Pagan celebrations and Christian feast days and can probably
never be accurately untangled – but who gives
a shit? Folklore is part of Halloween and talking about whether or not
the Celts influenced the Christians or vice versa is splitting hairs –
we’re just hoping to hear stories about human sacrifices on BOTH sides
of the argument.
4. The Sexy Costumes – sexy Halloween costumes are Loki’s gift to internet comedians. Pre-made sexy Halloween costumes are
idiotic, obvious, cheaply made and far too expensive for the amount of
material and workmanship presented in packages
labeled “saucy pirate” and “hot devil’s helper” and “sexy Big Bird.”
There are only two kinds of people who buy sexy Halloween costumes from
Party City or Super Halloween Discount Warehouse or the internet: people
who are energetic enough to go to the gym
regularly and want to show off but are too lazy to put the effort into a
real costume, and people who are so stupid that they’re the reason that
Q-tips come with safety warnings and that every class of
kindergarteners has to be reminded that paste isn’t food. Every Halloween party you go to after the age of 14 will feature
a Sexy Female Ninja Turtle fucking a Sexy Mario in the closet while a
Sexy Princess Peach alternately cries and vomits
into the kitchen sink, or some variation thereof, and that kind of tragedy is so chock-full of schadenfreude that every hipster in a 12 block radius will be masturbating furiously beneath his cravat. On the other hand
everything terrible that could happen to someone at a party is
substantially more hilarious based on the sexiness of his and/or her costume.
This relationship is inversely proportional, so if at some
point this Halloween you find a Sexy Chester the Cheetah (ears, bra, thong, heels, Cheeto dust) covered in the explosive beer-shit of a Sexy Bull (horns, nose ring, banana hammock, blank expression) my data indicate that you will stop laughing in mid-June 2014.
2. The Freedom - when was the last time you got to wear a cowboy hat to work? Unless you're a cowboy, a bouncer at a Country Western bar, or a douchebag my guess is last Halloween. Some of you reading this know the intense, creeping sadness that is Casual Friday; you have to wear stuffy clothes that you hate Monday through Thursday, and on Friday you get to wear polo shirts, dockers and terrible shoes. This is one of the biggest ways that working in an office will fuck with your head: acceptable office attire is more narrowly defined than acceptable clergy attire, and it doesn't include awesome hats. If you work in an office and show up wearing a T-shirt on Friday you'll get more glares and angry whispers than Nadya Suleman at a contraceptive convention. If you show up in jeans on a Tuesday it had better be to pack up your desk because you'll never live down the day that your Luckys were your only clean laundry. Unless that Tuesday happens to be October 31st. Regular people, those who don't work in offices (I think they're called "happy" people, but it's been so long since I've laughed that I can't say for sure) enjoy the benefits too - but there's no feeling like leaving your jacket on it's hanger in the morning and getting out the corset instead. Besides that the reaction you get carrying a sword on Halloween is a lot more "oh, dude, that's awesome," than the running and screaming you'll get for the rest of the year.
1. The Creativity - Halloween, as it is celebrated in America, is the most day on the calendar. What do we do to prepare for Halloween? Sure there are a lot of off-the-shelf costumes and decorations, but the people who get the most credit and who are talked about the most on Halloween are the folks who carve gorgeous pumpkins into brilliant sculptures dedicated to fear or laboriously create costumes from scratch or practice movements and accents and dialogue to act out their vision. What are the things that you remember from your childhood Halloweens? The history barely comes up, the slutty costumes don't register 'cause you were a kid, the candy is cool but gone in a couple of days, and the freedom doesn't matter so much when adults expect you to wear your underwear outside your clothes at least once a week. But you remember making things. You remember hollowing out a pumpkin and carefully tacking a pattern on the skin, the feeling of a parent guiding the safety saw in your hand, and the satisfaction of seeing your design come to life lit up from the inside. You remember making a costume out of odds and ends in your closet, choosing and discarding accessories for it and choreographing your superhero moves. Even if you used pre-made patterns and costumes as a kid you got to make choices - which ghost pattern you used on the pumpkin, which Disney princess you wanted to be or whether Spider-Man or Batman was cooler. Halloween is about expression, and the fact that it's okay to express yourself publicly (at least some of the time.) Halloween rewards creativity with candy for kids and attention for adults, soothing us and reminding us annually that we were made to make things. That's why Halloween has so many stories attached to it. There may be one or two Christmas movies that come out every year, but there are usually close to a dozen movies fighting for the box office on Halloween weekend. That's why there are approximately 4000 different "sexy" costumes out there - because even if the only thing you want to do on Halloween is show off your tits you want to choose the best way to express yourself creatively while doing so.
Anyway. Happy Halloween. Here's my creative contribution to the surreality of the day, if anyone's interested: It's an angler fish.
Cheers,
Keep making awesome stuff,
- Alli
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