Here's another old one...posted exactly a year ago. I haven't thought of anything new to say about Halloween that's particularly amusing and/or interesting. So, kids, this will have to do for now.

Smell My Feet

Halloween was not a holiday that I looked forward to as a child. Sure, I liked to dress up; that was the part I liked. My mom made a costume for me almost every year. I wanted to be a clown more times than not, and I think my mom encouraged it because it was an easy costume to put together. My first grade year, I was a ballerina. I was kinda fat that year (I suppose from residual toddler pudge), and the pink leotard I wore made me look like a pig in a tutu. Another year, I was a hobo (again..an easy costume). I found an old Japanese Kimono of my grandfather's in a box a coupla years later. I wore it with white powder/red lipstick/hair in a bun....the whole deal. Not exactly p.c., right? I always wanted to wear the supercool costumes with the plastic masks and paperthin fabric I saw at KMart, but my mom would never buy me those.

The trick-or-treating part was okay. I liked walking door to door asking for goodies. I never managed to eat the goodies I worked so hard to attain, though. I was supposedly allergic to chocolate as a youngster (my mom made me eat carob instead), so all the really good candy was passed on to my brothers. And all the nasty chewy kinds made me gag (still do). So I was shit outta luck, as they say. Emptying my plastic jack-o-lantern was always anti-climatic unless I happened to find a flimsy spider ring or a Burger King certificate for free fries.

Everything else about Halloween made me extremely uncomfortable. I was the epitome of "wuss"....unnaturally terrified of anything meant to be even remotely scary. I would work up the nerve every year to watch the Garfield Halloween special...and that felt like a huge accomplishment to me. The only thing that was actually scary about that show was the bad animation, but it was about all I could handle. I ventured into my school's haunted house in 3rd grade (eerily constructed in the Art room under the stage in the auditorium), and it took me months to recover. Any T.V. commercial that featured spooky music freaked me out. Every snippet of clip from a cheesy horror flic sent me screaming into the other room. Most kids saw Halloween as a time to be someone or something other than themselves....a time to experience the thrill of chill bumps and racing hearts. I just saw it as another opportunity for something REALLY horrible to finally do me in. It was inevitable. I just knew it. Sooner or later the BoogeyMan from the Ghostbusters cartoon would bust through my closet door, stomp his cloven feet over to my bed, and steal me away forever. Freddy Kruger would dare him to make it extra torturess. Of course, this monsterous fate could have come about at any time of the year, but it was MUCH more likely to occur on October 31st.

Funny thing is...I was also scared of Santa Claus.