I view Halloween is like a children’s toy.
If a kid is not playing well with a toy, one reasonable consequence is to take that toy away. The fact that we still have to remind people that racism is not okay on Halloween, and dressing like other cultures is not appropriate continues frustrates me. While I do think that college-aged people having a excuse to party is totally fine, however when this over-sexualization of characters and costumes tickles down to high school age people and even middle school age children, it’s really disturbing (and this does in fact happen).
Personally, I’ve never been that into dressing up, and the whole candy door to door thing never made much sense to me, so I wasn’t looking forward to doing the Halloween thing with my own children. That was until Ollie was born and I started seeing pictures of babies in costumes.
Seriously, cute little babies and toddlers are the best part of Halloween. I don’t know what it is about seeing little ones dress up that adds to their cuteness quotient but it totally does. Add in the ridiculousness of dressing up dogs in costumes and it somehow balances out all of the awfulness that is Halloween…mostly.
Every year we got Buffy costumes and that continued when Ollie came around and same with Ethan. We probably spent more money on costumes than I was comfortable at first but we made it happen. We mitigated the costs by going the Etsy route, which depending on the costume can be more affordable. Diana started doing this thing where she order a winter knit hat as part a costume, which doubles as a functional hat. We did this for a panda, koala, and dinosaur costumes.
Another thing that makes Halloween SO much better is the fact that my neighborhood does trick or treating the Sunday afternoon before Halloween. Kids run around for less than an hour, people sit in chairs on the sidewalk outside the house, which eliminates the awkward door knocking part. It’s well-lit in the middle of the afternoon, and generally, really easy.
Since we moved in, I stayed behind and handed out candy, but this year I took Ethan around. This was the first time I had ever gone trick or treating with any of my kids and it was super cute. Ethan really likes being held so it was impressive to see him walking on his own so much. He would slowly walk up to people holding out bowls of candy sitting on the sidewalk, carefully take one piece out of the bowl and put it in his bag and walk away. I tried to get him to say thank you and most of the time he tried, but it was usually really softly.
Ethan made it to almost ten different houses, which was a really far walk for him. It was nice to see so many of my neighbors be so delighted by his cuteness. Everyone was so nice to him, and he got really into this activity. Now this was followed by several meltdowns in the following days because well…candy, but it was still wonderful to walk with him around the neighborhood.
I still have issues with Halloween, but I’m glad that my family has figured out a way to make it work for us. I'm looking forward to one more to fit into a theme with my other sons and Buffy...this may take some creativity.
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