Halloween has all the markers of a fun and exciting holiday. We can dress in costume and adorn our homes with spooky decorations. There is candy every where you look, and the holiday lands within my favorite season of the year, autumn. Also, Halloween gives us the chance to greet our neighbors when we might not be seeing them as often as we had in the summer. Yes, there’s a lot to love about Halloween, but for some reason it always leaves me feeling stressed and a little overwhelmed. Here’s why:
- It sneaks up on me! (Pun intended). One second ago, I was enjoying the fall foliage and suddenly it’s the middle of October, there are Halloween decorations everywhere and all the moms at preschool pick up have already ordered or started working on their kids’ costumes!
- My desire to be crafty. As a child, my own costumes were always homemade, and I feel this pressure to create unique and elaborate costumes for my own kids. I try to talk myself into making their costumes for weeks, I research extensively and come up with detailed plans of the supplies I will need and how I’ll put it all together. Ultimately, I always wait too long and must purchase something at the last minute after the selection has been fully picked over.
- The costumes my kids choose. I always feel a little disappointed at the characters my kids choose to dress up as for Halloween. They want to be TV show characters or Disney characters rather than something empowering and/or clever. They’d make the cutest astronauts and I really think I could probably make those.
- The expense of it. It physically kills me to fork over hard earned money for something they’re going to wear for about an hour. We’re talking, for two kids, a minimum of probably $50 and that’s whether we buy or make the costumes. Not to mention the candy we have to buy to hand out to the neighborhood kids who trick or treat at our house. I don’t want to be known as the stingy house and set myself up for being TP’d or egged, but come on, those Reeses peanut butter cups do not grow on trees.
- Duluth Halloweens are cold. I’m looking at the picture of the mermaid costume that my daughter wants and its sleeveless and doesn’t come with pants and I’m just shaking my head. I guess I better size up so she can wear her snow suit underneath it.
- Too many sweets. Kids seem to accumulate and consume an exorbitant amount of sweets around Halloween. Unfortunately, it’s not just on the actual holiday, it’s everyday leading up to it starting at about October 15! Come November 1, my kids are going to need extensive dental work from all the sugar they’ve consumed and quite possibly, rehab for sugar addiction.
- My kids are afraid of everything. You want my kid to close their eyes and touch “zombie brains” it the form of cold spaghetti noodles. I can guarantee that that’s not going to happening, and I know that because every house we walk by with ghosts hanging from trees or skeleton bones peeking up through leaves he clings to my leg and begs to be picked up. I’ll bet my wages that when we go out trick or treating the first child we see costumed in a zombie mask will send us scurrying back into our house and dealing with nightmares for the following few days.
- Pumpkin carving is a lot harder and messier than it looks. You have an image in your mind’s eye of what the pumpkin will turn out like and you go into the project with excitement. However instead, you end up with misshapen eyes, uneven mouths and a couple of pretty serious cuts on your hands/fingers.
- It’s so awkward to try to guess what other kids are dressed up as. There is nothing worse than when a kid is at your doorstep trick or treating and you can’t for the life of you figure out what their costume is supposed to be. After making a few half hearted guesses, just send them on their way with a couple extra pieces of candy.
- Someone is going to throw a fit when it’s time to actually put the costumes on. One of my kids will definitely balk at the idea of actually wearing the costume that we’ve carefully selected from the 15th store they shopped in. If you see us out trick or treating without costumes on, you’ll know why.
So here’s what I’m going to do about it. I’m going to suck it up, put a smile on my face and let my kids have the time of their lives. I’m going to let them dress in whatever costume they want (within reason) and eat a whole bunch of candy until they’re running wild like lunatics. We’re scour every secondhand shop that we can find until they locate the costume that makes them happy because cost is one area I won’t compromise on. I’m going to enjoy the fact that they’re happy and healthy kids and then I’m going to eat loads of their candy after they go to bed under the pretense of “getting rid of it so they don’t eat too much.” Then, when next year comes around we’ll do it all over again.
