I’ve never really been that excited about Halloween. I still remember the days when we were expected to dress up for the Halloween parade at school, and how much I never enjoyed it. I always felt like the poorest kid, even though I obviously wasn’t (at least, now I know this). I still remember in first grade, my mom took me shopping at a Halloween store, and she said to me, “Okay, you can pick one costume, any costume. But just remember that you have to wear it every year until the end of elementary school.” She explained that she and my dad couldn’t afford a new costume for me every year (Ed wore the same Garfield mask trick-or-treating until high school. I had no idea how he felt about that because I never asked). I was only six at the time, but somehow, I was still rational even then. So I responded, “But I’ll be bigger then.” My mom nodded. “You will be, so that’s why we’ll have to buy an extra LARGE costume!”

So, I looked through all the costumes. I really wanted to be a fairy or a princess. But I wasn’t sure I’d want to be that five years in a row. So I settled on what seemed “neutral” at the time – a pumpkin/jack-o-lantern outfit. And that’s when I decided I would probably never like Halloween as a dress-up event for myself.

Today, I still don’t get excited about dressing up (and I haven’t dressed up since 2012), but I do admire the care that other people take in doing very elaborate makeup (my favorite I saw on Instagram was a dying woman who painted her neck so that it looked like her throat was split completely open), and I love seeing little babies dressed up in the most ridiculous outfits (this year’s favorite for me was a 2-month old baby in an ostentatious peacock outfit that was three times her size). Maybe I will get excited about it one day when I have a child to dress up, but for now, it’s not really for me.