A Brief History of Our Half-Assed Halloweens

Next year will be different

Nov 01, 2024

Like many new parents, when Max was born, I was determined to make all of his ‘firsts’ memorable ones: Halloween included. Memorable for us, I mean: he was just 10 months old, after all — he wasn’t even going to remember it the next morning, let alone in years to come. But WE would, and this seemed important enough for me to go out and buy him a little Halloween costume, even though we had absolutely no Halloween-related plans, and he would basically just be wearing it around the house.

If I’m totally honest here I’m pretty sure I mostly did this because I felt like it was what I was supposed to do as a parent. It was what everyone else seemed to be doing, after all. Over on Instagram, for instance, I knew — I just KNEW — that The Others would be out in force, with their creative costumes and their surprisingly placid offspring, all of whom would be more than happy to pose for studio-quality photos, wearing some kind of elaborate costume that would go viral on social media and make their parents Insta-famous. There would be toddlers dressed in historically-accurate reproductions of Marie Antoinette’s most sensational outfit; there would be mums who’d managed to work out how to ACTUALLY turn their babies into pumpkins… It was going to be HELL, in other words.

And it was, too. When I logged onto Instagram the next morning, everyone’s kid was smiling sweetly in a handmade Halloween costume. Parents were doing laps of honor, while simultaneously fielding calls from Hollywood costume designers looking to hire them.

Max, meanwhile, was in a supermarket-bought Harry Potter outfit, only without the hat, because he refused to wear a hat.

And without the wand, because giving a 10 month old a pointy stick probably wouldn’t win me any Parent of the Year awards, either.

Oh, and also without glasses, a scar, or anything else that would’ve made him look even remotely like Harry Potter.

So, yeah, just a onesie with a cape, basically. And I had to take the cape off when it became obvious that it was just annoying him, so… literally just a onesie, then. GOD.

#MAKINGMEMORIES #REALLYHALFASSEDONESTHOUGH

And that was Max’s first half-assed Halloween.

The next year, I messed it up again: only that year, I messed it up differently, Well, never let it be said that I’m the type of person to make the same mistake twice: er, even though I totally AM the kind of person to make the same mistake twice — or even three, or four, or even five times, really, because that’s basically been the story of our half-assed Halloweens to date.

That year, I half-assed Halloween by deciding to be totally blasé and unbothered about the whole thing (i.e. I didn’t bother dressing him up, because he was only 1 at the time, and I’d learned my lesson from the previous year: or, at least I thought I had…), only to find that all the other kids at the playgroup we went to were dressed TO THE NINES. Seriously, it was like an episode of Bridgerton up in there. I was surprised they even let us in.

I got through the next few years by buying Max another, larger Harry Potter costume, and telling myself things would improve once he was old enough to take the reins, as it were, and pick out something for himself, leaving me to do the only bit of Halloween I actually enjoy: the shopping.

But I was wrong about that. Because while it would be true to say that Max loves Halloween almost more than life itself, he loves it for one reason, and one reason only:

SWEETS.

At six, he has very little interest in the ‘spooky’ side of the holiday, and only the vaguest possible interest in dressing up at all, really … unless, that is, he can dress as something connected to whatever his Very Specific Interest is at the time.

Last year, it was Skibbidi Toilet, and, for Halloween, Max wanted to be a Cameraman. (If you have no idea what those things are, please consider yourselves lucky…) Terry duly spent hours carefully crafting a giant ‘Cameraman’ head out of cardboard. It was amazing. It was perfect. It won a prize at the village Halloween Party. At last, the Halloween curse had been broken!

But no.

It had not.

The Skibbidi Toilet Head turned out to be too big to be allowed in school, for their all-class party. Now, this is exactly the kind of thing you’d think I’d have easily predicted, but, come on people: do you seriously think I’d spent four years half-assing Halloween costumes at that point just to turn things around on year five? Of course not.

I failed to predict the Skibbidi Toilet head not being allowed in school. And because the Skibbi Toilet Head was basically the entire costume, and, without it, Max was just wearing his normal clothes, we had a problem. A problem which, it turned out, could only be solved in time by me making a quick dash to the school’s used costume rail, and picking out the only costume I thought would fit him.

It was a police officer’s uniform.

It did not, in fact, fit him.

The trousers were too short. The jacket was too big. The hat kept falling off, and the badge was missing.

Max ended up attending his school party in joggers and and oversized ‘police’ jacket which looked exactly like a cheap blazer. In the photos the school sent us, all of his classmates are witches and ghosts and monsters, and Max looks like he’s about to take a Zoom call in 2020, and has just hurriedly thrown a jacket on over his PJs.

But it was okay. Because the school party was just ONE part of the week-long celebration that is Halloween these days, and it was to be immediately followed by the Main Event: Trick or Treating. Max would be able to wear the Skibbidi Toiket Head for Trick or Treating, and all would be well.

Max refused to wear the Skibbidi Toilet Head for Trick of Treating.

Actually, he ran out of the house so fast as soon as he realized trick or treating had already started that he almost forgot to wear his shoes. In vain, we tried to persuade him to put on his costume, but to no avail; it was too big, he said — it would impede his progress in collecting the all-important sweets. In the end, I ran back the house, then chased after him with a ‘wizard’s cape’ (i.e. the Harry Potter costume he’d worn for both Halloween and World Book Day the previous year, because, seriously, I’m supposed to come up with TWO costumes per year now?), which I threw around him as he raced down the street with a collection of children who all looked like they’d come straight from the set of an actual horror movie.

And so ended our fifth half-assed Halloween. So close, and yet so, so far. So, to recap:

Year 1: Half-assed Harry Potter

Year 2: LOL

Year 3: The Covid Year. We did actually do socially-distanced trick or treating, though, and that year he was a a scary witch, which was quite good, tbf, so it figures we’d peak with our costuming on the year no one actually saw him, because everyone just left bags of sweets on their doorsteps to be picked up…

Year 4: Harry Potter: Reprise

Year 5: Harry Potter / Skibbi Toilet Cameraman / Zoom call hell1

“This year will be different,” I said, as I opened the conversation about costumes with Max all the way back in September. “This time we won’t choose a ‘costume’ that revolves completely around one item which, when removed, means you’re just wearing your ordinary clothes. We’ll choose something spooky and spectacular, and, honestly, I don’t even care how much it costs: we WILL get this right for once!”

“I want to be Stephen Sharer from You Tube,” said Max — only he called him ‘Stephen Share’, because Stephen Sharer is American, and that’s the correct way to pronounce his name, apparently.

For those of you who don’t know — and I’m going to take a wild guess that’s most of you — Stephen Sharer is a You Tuber who makes ‘family friendly’ content, as well as music, and a bunch of other stuff like hoodies and fidget spinners, etc. He has 11 million followers, including pretty much all of Max’s friends, and, after some questioning, I figured out that Max’s insistence on dressing as him for Halloween was pretty much just a transparent attempt to get me to buy him some ‘Sharer Fam’ merch — or ‘murch’ as Max calls it.

“Let’s just have a little think about that,” I said, thinking we had plenty of time to change his mind, and come up with a ‘costume’ idea that didn’t just involve Max dressing like … well, a pretty normal looking guy, who wears pretty normal looking clothes, and looks … normal. 2 “You might change your mind nearer the time, and want to be something a bit more spooky.”

Well, folks, here’s Max on the way to the village Halloween party on Sunday afternoon:

He did not win a prize for Best Costume this year.

He did spend a lot of time explaining to people who Stephen Sharer was, and why we should pronounce his name as ‘Share’, though. Or, at least, he did for the first hour of the thing: I have no idea what he did for the rest of it, because by that point I was back home in bed, clutching a hot water bottle and trying not to move my head in case I threw up. Yes, folks, I had found a new way to mess up Halloween. Yay, me!

My best guess is that it was some kind of 24 hour sickness bug. It could also have been something I ate, I suppose, but I hadn’t eaten anything that Terry and Max hadn’t had too, and they were both fine, so … yeah. No idea what it was, but oh my God, did I feel rough.

I hardly moved for the next 24 hours, during which I survived mostly on ice lollies for fluid (Because I couldn’t trust myself not to throw up actual liquid), and the occasional Haribo taken from the Halloween stash. It was horrific. And because I have health anxiety, and can never get ill without assuming it’s The Very Worst Case Scenario, I spent most of my time just lying there assuming I would probably die, and that everyone’s final memories of me would involve me putting together yet another totally half-assed Halloween costume for my kid, and writing a newsletter about slippers.

Happy Halloween, everyone!

But I survived. And not only did I survive, I also went on to buy a ridiculously small pumpkin, because that’s all they had left by that point. Here it is, surrounded by 80 bags of goodies that were all gone within the hour…

(The face design was Max’s work. I got to do the gross ‘scooping out’ bit, so it’s a good job I was over my sickness bug by then…)

Naturally, it rained on the night itself. The Stephen Sharer mask lasted for approximately 10 minutes on top of Max’s head (because he had to be able to see his way to the sweets) before it got blown off and landed in a puddle, after which it was just a sodden piece of cardboard which I had to carry for the rest of the evening, and Max looked like he hadn’t bothered with a costume at all, and was basically just raiding people’s houses for the hell of it. I spent at least two minutes standing outside a house ‘supervising’ a gang of kids who were collecting treats from it, only to eventually realize that Max wasn’t among them, having already moved onto the next house in the dark.

The thing is, though; despite all of this, Max had an absolute ball. He thought his costume was awesome and clever, and, fortunately for him (and me) everyone was kind enough not to contradict him on that. It was an excellent reminder that any pressure that exists in regards to costumes and treats and decorated houses (bear in mind here that at least one house in our street actually calls in a firm to decorate their house for Halloween, and … we had a tiny pumpkin and the light on…3) exists purely in my head. It’s just the fear of being judged as a parent for not having made the appropriate amount of effort, and, honestly, as long as Max is happy, then that pressure really shouldn’t matter.

Nevertheless, I still ended the day thinking that Next Year Will Be Different. Next year I’ll have more money for cool house decorations and better treats, plus more energy (which will be a by-product of the ‘more money’…) to put all of these decorations up and then take them back down again — a level of effort that felt like it would’ve completely defeated me this year, at the tail end of a sickness bug, and with Halloween happening to fall on the same week as the deadline for my book. Next year the garden won’t be so neglected that I’m embarrassed for anyone to see it, let alone attempt to decorate it, and I will finally come up with a clever costume idea that will fulfill both Max’s need to cosplay as one of his heroes, and my need to have at least one Halloween which I do not half-ass.

(I will also be better dressed and have really great hair. God, I can’t wait for next year…)

But that’s next year. For now, we have a very happy little boy and a house full of sweets, and that’s good enough for me.

I will leave you with Max’s trick or treat joke4, which, OK, didn’t get quite as good a reception as the year he went door to door singing ‘Dolly Parton’s ‘Jolene’, but which he told me he’d picked because he knew I would like it:

Why do vampires hate Taylor Swift?

Because she’s got baaaaadd bllooood…

BoomBoom

Until next week,