Halloween Costumes
Imagination Lives On
Kids love to play dress up and imagine great adventures. Lucky the children sneaking up to an attic with trunks of vintage clothes, high heels, big hats with slightly ratty feathers, baseball and railroad caps, cowboy boots, a Mary Poppins magic brolly, capes and sou'westers!
Imagination flowers with real things.
I was lucky in my clever mother: she made my Halloween outfits. She might buy a mask, but then sewed costumes from crepe paper. My fave was the owl mask and a tunic and trous of overlapping feathers, winged sleeves that all but flew away!
They only lasted the one night, but remembering such unabashed outrageous creativity remains a lifelong source of joy.
She also made cookies for the trick-or-treaters, oatmeal-raisin and chocolate-chip, before we started fearing our neighbors, and dared buy only food-industry candy.
In the Rocky Mountain town nearby, the community has made it safe for families on Halloween. The plaza sports a haunted house, games, a pirate ship. And small businesses in the walking area of town get costumed themselves and offer treats to the wee witches, ghouls, angels and superman..-woman..(superpersons!)
My last Halloween, I'd begun to elongate and decided to go as a tree! I wore green tights, twined myself with ivy, wore a bird's nest in my hair.
Feeling quite jolly about it, I soon learned that it was my last All Hallows' Eve as a child.
We knocked on a door, and shouted a joyful Trick-or-Treat! A dumpy woman with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the corner of her mouth had nothing to offer but this: She looked me up and down, and said, "Next time, just wear a fig leaf."
But I never stopped loving the festivity, the excitement of dress-up, and some ancient frisson of the parting of the veil between this life and the mystical.
In our societal-asylum of us-and-them, and them must be condemned, am reading about the particular self-righteousness condemning Halloween.
It's not Christian. No?
Is it human? Is it fun? Does it enrich us with playfulness?
On a more sober note, the kids get sugar/MSG/Aspartame/HFCS/artificial color-highs from the industrial-strength "candy."
And pondering our economic overreach, our Wiley Coyote teetering on a cliff's edge, we might put that wild whoopee fun money into... oh, food pantries?
That said, I may rummage in an old trunk... a costume for the night's silliness, and celebration of autumn harvest. Fall colors of gold and crimson, bright pumpkins, and munchkins afoot!
Thanks to all for
Reading, reviewing and yea gifting
posted by Wayfarer @ 12:45 PM
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