I am not a huge fan of the month of October, although there are months I like less (looking at you, February) due to their capricious nature. My main beef with October is that the world at large seems to think that it should be 31 days of ooky spookiness. Haunted houses start to populate the landscape somewhere around the last week of September. Cable networks devote their entire monthly schedule to ghastly programming. Entire neighborhoods begin to sport visions of the undead, some of which will still be hanging around (literally) well into Christmas.
Hey, I’m Mox. I don’t DO scary.
However, when you live with a kid Of A Certain Age, and that kid has a father who is equally immature, things like this sometimes can’t be avoided.
So we have a number of decorations that will be festooning the Mox establishment for the next 4+ weeks, including but not limited to a giant blow-up cemetery gate, styrofoam tombstones, plastic bones of all sorts, vampire bats, rabid mice/rats, spiders, webs, disembodied hands, etc., etc., etc. It’s like Halloween Express threw up all over my yard.
Me, I’m over here on the front porch with my scarecrow and straw bale and pumpkins. Planting mums and pansies and ornamental kale.
As you can tell, it’s two different approaches to the same month. With any luck, mine will last all the way to Thanksgiving.
To be truthful, when Spawn was a wee tyke, I enjoyed this a whole lot more. For one thing, the kid couldn’t have cared less about decorating anything back then. I could do my tasteful harvest-time welcome on the front porch and call it a day. I could select a cutesy costume for my sweet Precious to wear whilst participating in the downtown merchants’ annual trick or treat. Sort through all the candy, pull out the good stuff and dump the rest.
The end. Moving right along toward Thanksgiving and pie.
But damn these kids today and their independent thought. Nowadays Spawn wants to select a costume personally and decorate personally, and my husband is all too happy to go along with it.
I miss the days when getting a costume for Spawn was an easy affair. Get the Lilly’s Kids catalog, look through it for a few days, settle on an idea, and go out and approximate it for a lot less. I could costume Spawn up really cute back in those days. Though one year the kid wanted to be a Siamese cat and I can tell you right now, they do not make Siamese cat costumes. We settled for a regular cat, black. And that was a tough sell on my part.
This year we’re still on the mostly cute side, and I realize that those days are coming to a close because the kid is lingering more at the blood-and-guts costume section. But in true straddle-the-divide form, Spawn wants to be a… vampire… mouse.
“It’ll be easy, Mom! Just a mouse costume and some vampire teeth!”
Um. Oh…kay….
Let me just conjure up a gray bodysuit or something, a tail, some round ears, and… vampire teeth.
First of all, a mouse costume is not as easy to come by as one might think. If Spawn were a toddler, then no problem. They make mouse costumes in those sizes. But at 8 years of age, mouse costumes are more along the order of Mickey and Minnie. Eight year olds are apparently supposed to want to be things like pirates and princesses and Jedi warriors and stuff. I did find a few mouse costumes online, but $40 a whack is a bit steep for something that’s going to get worn once, for a couple of hours, and then never again. If I sewed I could probably whip it together out of some gray fleece. At this point in time it’s looking like a gray sweatshirt and sweatpants are going to have to do the trick, especially since I’ll be able to repurpose those and can thus justify the expense.
Spawn’s greatest wish this year is to have a Halloween party. I’m giving it some serious consideration, though I haven’t agreed to it. It does seem a shame to go to all the trouble to decorate the yard just so the neighbors walking their dogs can enjoy it. Our back yard isn’t big but could be perfect for a few games and some hot dogs and s’mores. The oldest public cemetery in town is a mere two blocks from our house… it’s possible we could do a scavenger hunt there. Hmm. Now if I could just look into my crystal ball and divine whether or not we’d have rain on Halloween, I could make a firm decision.
Even though I’m not much on Halloween and all its’ attendant charms, I do realize that this is an opportunity to give Spawn a childhood memory, while I’m still cool enough to be seen. These days are flying by rapidly. So, mouse costume it is, and possibly a Halloween party, if we can keep it to a manageable roar.
Stay tuned.
— Mox
I’m on your side of the porch with the scarecrow and the ornamental kale. A neighbor’s copy of Martha Stewart’s Living was accidentally delivered to our house last week. I credit Martha with bring the word “autumnal” into conversation. But the ideas for Halloween were hopelessly cute. It made me want to call in sick and start crafting away. Then I remembered that my sons are adults.
As a child, I was a lion once in a yellow sweatshirt and a crepe paper mane, so that sounds like a plan. When we lived in NYC, we had a Halloween party as kids couldn’t just go door to door trick-or-treating. Now I’ll have to write a post about that! Bottom line, it was lots of fun. As parents, we always feel the need to provide those precious childhood memories. At least I did, so my kids could remember something good that happened before they turned into zombies, er I mean teenagers.
Mox – I am going to write a Halloween post and would like to link it to this post. I think it’s hilarious. Heads up!
Be my guest! 🙂
[…] my blogroll, wrote a hilarious post about her own ambivalence about Halloween and the inevitable Costume Drama in outfitting her eight-year-old son, Spawn. It’s a fun read. This year, the party is at […]