Rantings of a holiday offended mother….

What the hell is with people and Halloween this year?

Do you remember the days of sitting with 10 dollars, some fabric, thread and a needle, glue, and whatever else you could find and trying to piece together a ghostly ghoul or a moldy corpse, or a elegant vampire?

Do you remember turning puns into costumes? I do!! However, the Red Bank Primary School will not be encouraging such creative shenanigans this year! No!! This year the school theme is “There’s no place like home” and the children riding on and walking next to the FLOAT in the parade have to dress like those darling (read creepy), little (read stereotyped), munchkins from our favorite movie of all time “The Wizard of Oz”. (So not my favorite movie of all time.)

Sigh. Well having just read Wicked, I will skip the diatribe about how misunderstood the Wicked Witch of the West really was (though I encourage all of you to read Wicked, it was a fantastic novel) and will instead move on with lambasting the Red Bank PTO.

How stupid is this. First of all, why are we having a float? Come on!! Its a halloween parade not the Mayberry fall festival. It’s supposed to be full of creative creepy undead things and the inevitable Star Wars characters. It is not supposed to be an event designed to satisfy the narcissistic needs of the children’s parents, it is supposed to be a chance to let your children come up with a truly dreadful costume, be it dreadful in a good way, or a bad one, and show it off to all their friends and neighbors. But no, this year all the darling little children will be dressed to look like members of the Lollipop Guild, which, while admittedly creepy, is going to result in the homogenization of the entire primary school.

So much for encouraging creative impulses.

So this year, when viewing the parade at Red Bank Primary, seek not the children dressed in costumes requiring you to guess again and again as to what they are, instead get ready to view a troop of munchkins. Whatever you do, don’t pay any attention to the parents behind the curtain.