01 November 08 - 00:44
Tis Halloween
I'm sitting here on Halloween night waiting for the trick or treaters to trickle into my door. Man, this isn't anything like Enterprise, which is a hamlet of about 300 people set in farm country where the next nearest hamlet is about five miles away, so the parents from miles around drove their kids into the two blocks that surrounded our house and we saw maybe 130 in a night. Other houses on the main road a block away got more like 200. Just at this moment, I'm up to 12. Oh, and an impressive pile of wrappers next to my computer desk.
In Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, intelligence is defined as being able to hold two mutually contradictory ideas in one's mind at the same time. Well, Halloween is my favourite holiday of the year. And Halloween is the worst holiday of the year. (Do I qualify for Mensa?)
It's my favourite holiday because it's the one day a year adults are allowed to dress up and behave like children. (Medieval events don't count, I've been going to them so long that 12th century clothes feel like ordinary clothes to me.) I love to dress up in costumes, and the further I get away from my workaday persona, the better. One year, I dressed up as the devil, with a bright red wig and horns, a silk lined cape, and a black business suit. When I ran into some people from my church, they looked me up and down and said, "Are you trying to tell us something?" "Well," I said, "I am United Church you know." And since they were from a small town where a lot of people were pretty uncomfortable with the socially progressive stands of the United Church, they knew exactly what I meant.
My inner child has always been fascinated with the idea of being someone else, even if just for a night. My favourite stories as a kid were the ones where the heroine dressed as a boy to escape her horrible situation, or where the hero could turn into an animal by some magical power. I love spy shows where the main character was in disguise; I'm currently working my way through the second season of Alias on DVD. I acted in high school musicals and drama club. And best of all, I became a writer, where I could totally inhabit the head of a person that I'd made up. Now there's a power trip. I don't write a lot of fiction these days, but I do still love to dress up for Halloween.
On the other hand, it's my least favourite holiday because every year I end up making at least one costume for at least one kid, and sometimes for myself while I'm at it. I love to do it. I volunteer to do it. In my childhood in the early 70s, the only costumes you could buy were those horrible overalls with bad monotone drawings of the character you were supposed to be, and a cheap plastic mask you could hardly see out of and that got totally slimed on the inside with your own condensed breath. My mother didn't sew, so that was my only choice. Considering that my older cousins had convincing bridal gowns and princess dresses in their closets, I was feeling cheated. So making these cool costumes now is total wish fulfillment.
But it's also the one time all year long I sew to a deadline. Sewing is the one thing in my life I work to keep free of deadline stress. I make classic style clothes that never go out of style, so whenever I finish them is good enough. Working this way, I usually complete between a dozen and two dozen garments a year, and it's refreshing to be free from the deadlines that drive the rest of my life. Except for Halloween. Deadlines and time stress haunt my sewing room only during the week leading up to Halloween.
This year, I promised my oldest daughter I would make her a cheerleader costume. If you know her, you know that her bookish and slightly sarcastic personality is about as far from the cheerleader stereotype as it could be, so the idea intrigued me. But with hubby away two weeks before Halloween and me away one week before, that left only one week to sew. And this week I also had to do all the meetings that were put off the previous week when I was away. I was getting home at 10:30 pm and starting in on a couple hours of sewing before falling exhausted into bed, only to do it all again the next day. Not cool. Not only that, but it left me with no time to think about my own costume, which for me is the highlight of the Halloween season.
I found myself trying to figure out how many hours I was putting in on a costume that my darling daughter was only going to wear for two hours. We bought a pirate lass costume for the other daughter, which only cost my hubby a terrifying hour in Value Village on a day when school was out, and a very similar amount of money to the pattern and discount fabric I got at Fabricville. In the throes of deadline pressure I was really resenting the time my project took, and yet the logical brain was noting that someone somewhere else in the world had to sew that Value Village costume, and I bet she makes a lot less money per hour than I do. We take our wealth for granted in this culture, and sometimes it takes something like an encounter with the real human cost of sewing a garment to make me realize that I too am addicted to this modern consumer culture, that I chose not to sew a second costume because I didn't plan far enough ahead, so I bought someone else's time instead, not to mention the greenhouse gases it took to ship it to us, and pick it up at the store. Okay, okay, I only have enough virtue for one handmade costume this year. I'll try again another year.
I finished the costume at 1:55 pm Halloween afternoon. My beautiful blonde daughter sure looked the part of a cheerleader, and why not, I'm sure a lot of cheerleaders have a reading list like hers. I ended up not dressing up this year, because I still have to finish a skirt for my pirate costume, maybe that'll be next year. There's no deadline, and I'd like to keep it that way.
Blessings, Heather.
two comments
Hi Heather: I can certainly feel your breathlessness as you slide toward the Hallowe’en deadline and I can also detect some feelings of satisfaction from being able to provide for your daughter a costume she will remember during her lifetime. What unique gifts you have given to your daughter and to yourself! Enjoy them. Brenda
Brenda - 01 11 08 - 16:23
My comment got rejected for a bad word. Not sure what.
In tech companies, dressing up at the office is common.
Henry Troup () - 16 01 09 - 01:06
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