Fright Night

I hate Halloween.

I mean, it's fine if you're a kid and all, but the whole dressing up thing as an adult really stresses me out.  Last year Michael went as a Vampireman - a fireman with vampire teeth.  I thought that was pretty funny.  But as an adult, you can't really get away with that sort of thing.  I mean, they don't make fireman costumes for grownups.  Oh, wait, I guess they do, but you have to spend the night with a bunch of burly guys who smell of smoke to get one.

We're going to our next door neighbors' hastily-arranged Halloween part tonight.  I won't know anyone, as their daughter goes to a different school.  This alone would be reason enough to feign swine flu, but I also learned today that it's fancy dress.  I suppose I should have assumed this and started preparing earlier in the week, but I was in denial.  So at 3.30 this afternoon, I set out to find something suitable to we.

The thing about dressing up for Halloween, for me at least, is that it has to be just the right sort of costume.  The get-up can't be lame, but it also can't show that I've made a big effort.  It has to be ironic without being obscure.  It has to be funny without being obvious.

Last year, I was a chav angel.  (As a reminder, a 'chav' is a young man or woman who mainly wears jogging outfits, drives a cheap little car with tinted windows and a loud stereo and has a seemingly unlimited supply of gleaming white sneakers.  In general, a 40 year old can't be a chav, though somehow there are a surprising number of older men who seem to think that they can.)  So for my costume last year I wore a track suit (well, sort of - I wore a pair of jogging bottoms and a hooded jacket that kind of matched) and a thick gold chain borrowed from Caroline's dress-up kit.  To this, I added a homemade halo and a pair of aluminum foil-covered fairy wings, also borrowed from Caroline's dress-up kit.  It was funny without being over the top and went well with Michele's she-devil wig.

You'd be surprised at the paucity of good halloween costumes here.  I could have been a Big Bad Wolf for £25 (this had a lot of potential to be funny, but the costume manufacturer disappointingly went for scary instead of silly), or a Dracula for £19.99 (but I feared this would make me look like I was taking the whole thing far too seriously).  So this year, I'm a has-been 80's hair band musician.  I couldn't find a long blonde wig in the 45 minutes I had to shop, so instead I'm wearing a white one that makes me look like one of the guys from Nelson after a DIY dye job.  The wig, a pair of ripped jeans (they're not meant to be ripped, I fell down and blew out the knee a few years ago), a white T-shirt (if I have one) and Michael's toy electric guitar comprise the extent of my effort this year.

Give me Thanksgiving any day.  Yeah, you have to cook a big meal and it takes a week and a half to do the dishes, but at least the only thing getting dressed up is the turkey.

And that's as it should be.