Seriously, Halloween sucks every year.  It seems like a fun, low-pressure holiday unlike the major holidays that demand homemade goods, presents, new clothes and special scheduling software.  Halloween is billed to be a low-key, kick-in-the-pants kind of day. Not.

Halloween,  pimped by Hershey and Nestle (must read this nasty story) is the new Christmas, which by the way, is dead to me. This is what my day looked like:

7:00 am Step and fetch for children to help assemble costume (of course, billions of dollars and hundreds of hours were spent crafting costumes over the past two months.)

8:00 am Drop girl child at school

8:15 am With boy child in tow, help assemble 1st grade parent project which is a FUN HOUSE. All week parents were instructed to obtain discarded appliance boxes to make box maze. Alway fun taping black plastic with no coffee in a room full of strangers.

9:00 am Work. The gig that generates cash to buy costumes.

12:00 am Leave work to go to 4-year old Halloween program and party.

12:20 am Get to school for 12:30 performance and find out IT’S OVER!!!! The show started at noon and I wrote the wrong time on my calendar. Husband is mad. I cry.

12:45 pm Race to grocery store to buy veggie tray for school carnival.

1:30 pm School Carnival – Hot day with hordes of screaming, dirty children is costumes.  There was an upside to this event. The 7th graders hosted the haunted house and there was little adult supervision. It was great!  There was grabbing and shrieking. Probably 40% of the kids left the haunted house crying.

3:30 pm Home, but babysitter leaves at 4:00. No work today.

5:00 pm Halloween party across town. Just can’t do it.

6:30 Trick or treating in a neighborhood of senior citizens yields an extremely high candy return.  With only three families in the neighborhood who trick or treat the neighbors feel compelled to give each child ten goodies…I mean GOODies.  The kids got so much candy that there was not enough room in their bags to hold it. One guy gave out cash with giant Hershey bars.

Tomorrow there is NO SCHOOL so that the kids can recover and the faculty can reconfigure the school after the big carnival. Again, NO WORK FOR ME. School is a conspiracy against working women.

Halloween forced me to drive my car out of my zip code to procure puffy paint and cowboy boots, which were both items that the teacher pronounced mandatory. I resent that.

The grandparents sent useless stuffed animals that sang songs or made noise. One grandmother spent upwards of $100 on costumes that SURPRISE didn’t get worn.  It’s just too much. Next year I’m boycotting Halloween.

This year I’m boycotting Christmas, but I’m too tired to write about it.

Comments

[Karen]

I love you! seriously. but not in a blog stalker way. hahahaha! you crawled into my head and threw up the contents! you rock!
My daughter GAVE UP halloween this year in a trade of punishments. She did something wrong, and wanted to go to the dance (7th grade by the way) and I said ..Ok.. you CAN go to the dance, and give up HALLOWEEN and spend an ENTIRE WEEK IN YOUR ROOM with no TV, MUSIC or games! * I just KNEW she would skip the dance.. right? WRONG!!!!!!!!! AAACK! She came to me and said.." Halloween comes EVERY year (and the dances dont come every month?) so, I'M GOING TO THE DANCE! and two hours later was balwing her head off in her room after HATING the dance and realizing she made the wrong choice! hahahahaha!
She was our door greeter last night While I got a foot rub! ahhhh... this halloween Was NOT so bad!

[Shelly]

You failed to mention the child hangover that occurs after a day of parades, parties, and an endless stream of candy. My son was 25 pounds of whiny, annoying, unreasonable demands this morning. F-U-N, fun!

[Polly]

But the kids were adorable, right?

[Killswitch]

Halloween? Usually the kids are scared off when I open the door and growl like a death metal vocalist - we boycot that thing Helloween. No candy - we love kids and we love to do things for kids but we hate to be forced into Helloween.

Just that my wife doesn't want me to run around in CANNINAL CORPSE t-shirts all night long. Cause that is too scary for our own kids.