It’s the funnest night of the season, when you can dress up like a sexy children’s cartoon, drink dessert cocktails named and dyed to look like viscera, and candy sales are bountiful, so you can eat mini Kit Kats till you feel like puking.
I haven’t celebrated it with friends in years, but I’m always nostalgic around Halloween. It’s festive and kooky without the pressure that comes with holidays centered seemingly around family expectation, potential phony sentimentality masked as consumerism, and eating as social-performance. It’s not that I don’t enjoy that for what it is, but Halloween was for me and the other revelers in the roving harvest party.
How do you make the Halloween fun, Crassholes–scandalizing local churches? Attending a midnight horror movie showing at a local theater, or hosting a marathon at home for guests? Hunkering down to watch six straight hours of “Treehouse of Horror” episodes? Getting drunk with friends in a graveyard or a bar purportedly haunted by a famous ghost? Taking your little ones door to door to egg your asshole neighbors trick-or-treat? Dressing up your pets? Whipping up a merry murderess’s cake with crimson “blood” splattered over buttercream fondant to take to a friend’s party? Carving Michelle Obama’s beautiful face into a pumpkin for a local carving contest? (I’d go with the stinkeye/eyeroll she gave John Boehner.)
Is there a local costume contest, theme party, or edgy haunted house you’ll be patronizing? Will you be the one house on the block that treats the kids right and hands out full size Snickers at the door? Who or what ghoul or pop cultural reference do you want to see among the Halloweenies out and about?
Who will you be, or who would you want to be, if you had your ideal costume budget?
(And if you’re planning to chill at home because you have to work or run errands, what would you like to do if you could take the next day off and sleep off your Witch’s Brew hangover?)
Tell me in the comments how to do up Halloween right where you are.
