HALLOWEEN has really exploded over the last number of years, rivalling even Christmas with regards to spending. Every year Halloween shops open up in our city centres, you can buy Christmas-esque Halloween lights – albeit they are twinkling skeletons instead of stars – and people go to town decorating their houses and gardens in gruesome fashion.
Some people love it. Others run screaming dramatically from the terrifying masks, inappropriate costumes and mountains of pound-shop sweets, like the stereotypical blonde female killed in the first five minutes of a slasher movie.
A survey conducted by Mumsnet last week found that one in three parents would be happy if Halloween just didn't exist. Their annoyance was anchored in the rowdy behaviour, feasting of sweets and commercialism that revolves around the season. One in six said they actually 'hated' the celebrations. With Halloween spending in the UK to top £300 million this year, some parents say it's an expensive waste of time. Party poopers.
Terrifying costumes, the killer clowns, expensive, impractical, never-can-be-worn again outfits, the consumption of an entire Tesco bag full of sweets, kids walking around in the advanced darkness, pumpkin mess, having to dress your house like Amityville the House on the Hill, extreme costume competition, nuclear-strength toxic face paint, dangerous sparklers, dye that doesn't come out of hair for weeks, watching fireworks in apocalyptic rain. What are these spoilsports on about? Halloween is great!
In its survey Mumsnet found that one in five households closed their curtains, turned off their lights and pretended not to be home to avoid trick or treaters and reported that the Killer Clown craze that has been sweeping the land this year has done nothing but alienate people further from the scariest season of all.
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I can't help but hark back to a simpler time. When the highest form of Halloween commercialisation consisted solely of a twirly rack of plastic werewolf masks for 50p a pop.
Back in those days Halloween night was wall to wall brown duffle coat monsters. Halloween shops, with their rows and rows of cheap yet expensive tat, hadn't yet been invented. Mothers and fathers were too busy doing life to spend hours or days trying to construct elaborate and imaginative costumes for their offspring. Net curtains were torn down from the kitchen window to create terrifying ghost get-ups and 50p masks – which made breathing or seeing virtually impossible – were teamed with a chunky red jumper and your school coat to fashion a terrifyingly life-like replica of 'Anoraked Beelzebub'.
The streets were packed with bed-sheet ghosts and children of mammies who made minimum effort and weren't afraid to show it. There were stripy-pillow-cased shepherds, giving their Christmas school panto attire another run out, and little boys who went to town on their mum's make-up set and weren't too sure who or what they were supposed to be, beyond messy, and the lads into CGI who shone a torch under the chin for three hours for maximum dramatic effect.
Posh houses would have given out packets of that yellow crackly stuff, that if you drank with Coke, exploded in your stomach, giving labour-like cramps. Health-conscious houses would give out oranges and apples that were lobbed into the hedge on the way back up their path. The houses dishing out the good sweets were called on three or four times, tricksters swapping costumes at their gate to confuse homeowners.
There were no sweets police back in the day. You'd run home, your white plastic bag brimming with treasure. You'd separate out the monkey nuts from the penny sweets and then you'd eat the sweets until your tooth fell out or you were sick. The night wasn't truly a success until someone boked, a theory many of us have taken into our adult lives.
Whatever way you do Halloween – if you're the person who dresses your entire house in fake spider's webs and transforms your garden into a graveyard, or if you close your curtains and turn off your lights until Halloween is over – have a great one.
