Happy Halloween

I was collecting my nieces from school before their mid-term break and they came out of school dressed as a wizard and witch and then proceeded to chatter excitedly all the way to my car about the different costumes you can have. Children tend to mostly go for scary and cute at halloween because those are the only dimensions of this holiday that they actually understand and the smaller they are the less scary their costumes seem to be. In fact the girls (at 5 and 7) were talking about how some of the older kids had costumes they found to be too scary. Still being of a rather delicate nature when it comes to all things spooky we, as their extended family, have danced around some of the scarier elements of halloween like the zombies, what vampires actually do and ghost stories. This means the girls are prone to throwing around terms like haunted without actually knowing what it means. Such as vampires are haunted to which I reply sure guys vampires are haunted and leave it there like a good auntie. They had noticed that a lot of the older kids had come as zombies but they don't know what zombies are so they were telling me that you could dress up as a dead nurse or a dead bride and while I giggled (discretely ) to myself at their innocence it got me thinking about adult costumes.

Now I do know plenty of people who are fairly inventive when it comes to the halloween costume. In fact my Facebook newsfeed is littered with them. It seems to me, the least artistic person I know, that everyone else is some sort of expert at fashioning their own costumes and scarily realistic make up to accompany it. Where as my best attempts would still look like I face planted into a bucket of face paints. However, you don't have to go much further a field to find the swarms of women who see Halloween as an excuse to be a slutty nurse/bride/cat or whatever. Slutty is the operative word. For some women you might even be forgiven for not knowing they were actually in costume.

Sometimes the results are amusing and sometimes embarrassing but mostly just slightly degrading to women everywhere. Sometimes the costumes are store bought or online and there's more than one post dedicated to things that should not be made into sexy costumes and yet are all the time. I can't even say much because in my early years in college I believe I may have gone as a sexy devil or something at some point but that was less about slutting it up than pure economy. I was already wearing a low cut dress so all I needed to do was stick on a pair of devil horns and some red lipstick and hey presto we have a slutty devil, sort of. 

A few years back I had the opportunity to go out in Limerick city during Halloween week and was under serious pressure to put together a good costume because I was going to an art students party where all the costumes require a certain amount ingenuity and a whole lot of effort. So with a little help I was a zombie of sorts which involved minimal effort on my part and someone else doing my make up. At least I sort of blended in with the art schools finest but as we made our way into Limerick city I noticed a divergence in costumes as though a line had been drawn. Even though I knew about 5 people in the city that night I could tell the art students from the university ones at 10 paces or more. If I thought that's freaky or I wonder how long that took to make then it was an art student every time however if I found myself wondering if she was cold/wearing just underwear/ something from Ann Summers then she wasn't. 

Who actually decided that we should take the fun out of Halloween and suck all the originality out of it too and why do so many women go along with it every year. Are they secretly harboring a desire to dress provocatively because a night out down here or my home town would indicate they manage just fine on all the other nights of the year. So this Halloween why not try something different, inventive or scary. You could always go as a dead nurse ..