This year's Halloween was the epitome of anticlimactic. I took the kids costume shopping a few weeks ago. Amazon Girl wanted to dress up in a devil outfit. We couldn't find a child's costume in her size, so we found the one adult costume that didn't look like it needed fishnet stockings and six-inch fuck-me stilettos to go with it. She looked absolutely adorable in it, but nobody will believe she's satan. She's just too stinking sweet.
Race Car Man went as Atom, the robot character from a movie about fighting robots the name of which escapes me at the moment and which I am absolutely too lazy to bother Googling.
Our parenting agreement says we each get two hours for Halloween. My ex texted me to say he wanted to have his two hours early. Well, from my perspective that really makes no sense. Its HIS week to have them, they're getting off the bus at my house. Is it really going to be an enjoyable Halloween for them to get picked up, trick-or-treat for two hours, get driven back to my house to trick or treat for two more hours and then have to make yet another twenty minute drive back to dad's house? On a school night? And still have showers and homework? Yeah, I didn't think so either.
I decided to just opt out of my two hour slot and let them go to enjoy their evening with their Dad. Our rural street is lousy for trick-or-treating anyway - there aren't any streetlamps so its pitch black out, and most of the neighbors either don't celebrate Halloween or go somewhere else to do it.
That left me free to do whatever I wanted for the evening. Except I'm not really high on everyone's social invite list what with me never going out to anything anywhere. At the same time, I really didn't want to deal with the low-level anxiety that always accompanies a Halloween where we entertain trick-or-treaters. Every time the doorbell rings or someone knocks, there is a chorus of angry barking from the House Pack. Since I always keep the cats inside on Halloween, inevitably one of them will try to make an escape while I'm shoveling candy into buckets which then necessitates me wandering around calling "Heeeere kitty kitty kitty" for a half hour. Its absolutely nervewracking. And because of the aforementioned Reasons My Neighborhood Sucks on Halloween, the reality is that I could sit there and be anxious and keep my poor dogs in the crate all night and get no kids at the door at ALL. Or I could get one trick-or-treater or I could get ten. There's never been any consistency to it.
Since I couldn't be bothered to take my "Middle Aged Woman who can't decide what to be" costume and go out somewhere, I decided to roll over and play dead instead. What with the events on the East Coast which have affected so many people, including close friends who still don't know if they have a house or any of their belongings left, it seemed appropriate to keep a quiet evening.
I turned off all the lights in the house, including the front-porch light, made sure all the dogs and cats were safely inside, and then made sure for the rest of the night the house looked as if no one was home. This entailed holing up in my kitchen with only the light over the stove and the light of the laptop; bathroom trips involved first quickly looking around the corner and out the living room window to make sure there were no little goblins and witches standing at the corner of the yard trying to decide whether to ring my doorbell and then using the light from my cell phone screen to make it down the hall so I could pee in the dark.
I felt a lot like the Halloween version of Scrooge, but it was still better than handing out candy while the dogs raised hell and the cats tried to dash out the door.
How was your Halloween?
