A Halloween Hodgepodge
Avant-garde Halloween Costume Ideas for Kids
Brexit: Smartly dress your child as Mary Poppins, Winston Churchill, or King Charles III. Next, roll them around in hog feces, smear Marmite all over their faces and hands, and douse them in Old Peculier. Remove one of their shoes and hand them a dogeared copy of Oliver Twist.
When begging for inclusion in the single candy market, instruct your child to say, “The sun never sets on the British Empire” instead of “Trick-or-Treat.”
Inflation: Purchase the cheapest suit you can find online at JCPenney. Procure a large wheelbarrow and fill it with sand. Dig a watermelon-sized hole in the middle of the sandpile.
Escort your child to the door of each house by pushing the wheelbarrow behind them. Have your child ring the bell.
When buying bonds to stimulate candy purchases in the open market, instead of saying “Trick-or-Treat,” have your child introduce themselves as the Chairperson of the Federal Reserve Board, insist that “inflation is transitory,” and bury their head in the sand.
Cancel culture: Dress your child in a t-shirt emblazoned with a classic rock (e.g., Lynyrd Skynyrd) or heavy metal (e.g., GWAR) band, Levi’s jeans, and Converse All-Stars. Ruffle their hair and add make-up depicting a five o’clock shadow. Dab Pabst Blue Ribbon on their neck and chest for fragrance. Write “3rd Panzer Division” on their forearm and “BEAST” across their neck using a permanent marker.
When demanding candy due to reverse racism, instead of saying “Trick-or-Treat,” have your child declare themselves a “critical thinker, Bro” and announce their upcoming Netflix special deriding the perils of cancel culture.
Extinction: Dress your child normally. Cut a hole into a large, transparent, inflatable pool raft. Insert your child and various insects, birds, amphibians, reptiles, and small mammals inside the raft. Inflate with air. Re-seal the hole while leaving small punctures for venting.
Affix two pressurized, cylindrical gas cannisters to the raft’s inflation port, one dispensing air (78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, 1% argon) and the other dispending carbon dioxide (100%). Double the rate of flow of carbon dioxide into the raft relative to air.
When imploring a passive, disinterested public to take immediate candy action, have your child scream “We’re running out of time!” instead of “Trick-or-Treat.”
Democracy: Excellent for large groups. Dress most of the children in their favorite costumes. This is the proletariat.
Find and separate the most annoying kid. Dress him in a red Adidas track suit and black Kangol beret and blanket his chest with military-inspired medals, pins, and accolades. Find several large children. Dress them as soldiers and police officers and provide them with heavy-duty Billy clubs. Instruct them to stand behind the annoying kid. This is the state.
When seizing all candy while the secret police bludgeon the other children into submission, instead of saying “Trick-or-Treat,” have the annoying kid proclaim: “Might makes right.”
Finally, if none of these ideas work, you can always dress your kid up as an SS Officer or a Grand Wizard, because America.
Scariest Thing Imaginable by the Years
Age 4: Santa Claus isn’t real.
Age 7: The xenomorphs from the Alien franchise are real.
Age 14: Someone noticing my spontaneous erection.
Age 20: Partaking in an amphibious invasion during World War II.
Age 28: Online dating.
Age 32: Settling down in the New Jersey suburbs.
Age 37: Wiring twenty percent of me and my wife's life savings into the financial ether to make a down payment on a decrepit, vintage condo.
Age 42: Having a water pipe burst in our decrepit, vintage condo.
Fall is Trash
Every year a certain cohort of cultural commentators tries to assure me fall is wonderful. Some even haughtily suggest fall is the best season.
Over the years I’ve remained open-minded to the possibility, but now I’m rendering my final verdict on the matter: fall is pumpkin-spiced dumpster juice. And not only is fall pumpkin-spiced dumpster juice, and not only is fall not the best season, I’m declaring fall the worst season.
Summer is the best season. Summer is the season of BBQs, beaches, swimming pools, and sex. Summer is for concerts and festivals and vacations. For hiking and biking and road trips and raves.
Spring, the season of rebirth and renewal, is a close second. Spring is about hope. And May is the best individual month. If spring is your favorite season, you’ll get no argument from me.
Even much maligned winter has its charms. There’s Christmas Eve and Day — if you’re into that sort of thing — Western New Year celebrations, Lunar New Year celebrations, Super Bowl parties — if you’re into that sort of thing — and that annual early March thaw, which reminds everyone good times are once again on the horizon.
What’s fall got? Death and cinnamon brooms.
Beginning around September 21 — those glorious first three weeks of the month are technically summer — fall is when everything in the Northern Hemisphere immediately turns to shit.
All the plants and flowers die. It gets dark at three o’clock in the afternoon. Seasonal depression kicks in. Everyone eats their feelings. And — worst of all — communicable diseases of all stripes spread like California wildfires.
On Wednesday, October 19 this was my son:
On Thursday, October 20 this was me:
On Monday, October 24 this was my daughter:
On Tuesday, October 25 this was my wife:
The only good thing about fall — in the U.S. at least — is the Thanksgiving holiday weekend.
Family, food, bonhomie, Michigan losing to Ohio State by thirty points, and new episodes of our annual and perpetual influenza and Covid-19 epidemics.
