Happy Halloween

It's Halloween and very soon I will be putting on my costume: black pants, black shirt, black apron and black shoes. I will be going as a waiter, because my ass has to work tonight. I thought about pulling out the good ol' reliable Halloween costume and showing up to work in it, but decided to let my favorite holiday of all time just meld into a regular Sunday night at work. Surely there will be some customers there who will be in costume and I will seethe with jealousy that they get to participate while I have to bring them drinks. What is it about Halloween that I love so much? Maybe it's because it's a day that is perfectly acceptable to wear ridiculous costumes and makeup even though I wish I could do it every day. When I was a kid, the one costume I recall wearing was a Darth Vader one. It was October in Texas so it was still hot and muggy, but I wore that costume with pride. I took my dad's black motorcycle helmet and wore it over the mask to give it that Darth Vader helmet head look. I remember sweating my ass off in that thing and my mom telling me to just take off the helmet and leave on the mask. "No," I whined. "If I take off the helmet, then the costume won't look right and no one will know who I am!" As if the mask, cape, black boots and light saber weren't good enough clues.

Happy Halloween. Pretend that it is in the days before assholes put razor blades in apples and cyanide in Pixy Stix. Be a kid today. Remember how much fun it was to compare your bag of candy to your brothers' and know that you had more? And then you'd pour it all out onto the floor and divide it into piles to decide what you were willing to trade and what you were going to eat right away. And then a few weeks later you finally get to those candies that were the least favorites: those taffy kinda things wrapped in orange or black paper that you know they bought at the K-Mart. It was a sad day when those were the only candies you had left because it meant you already eaten the Smarties and the Bit o Honeys and the mini Snickers. All that was left was taffy. But you ate it it, because lame candy was better than no candy. After you ate that last piece of candy, you looked at the calendar and realized that the next Halloween was so far away. But you started to think about what you're gonna be anyway. Halloween lets us all flash back to that time in our lives when the only thing that mattered was having fun. Try to do that today. Have fun. And when you see the kids on the street, try to go back to when you were that age and remember the joy that this day gave you. While I am at work slaving away in my non-costume.

What was your favorite costume you wore as a kid? Do you remember? Happy Halloween!