Hallow, Hallow

Another Halloween has come and gone.  It has always been an odd event for me (i'm not so sure it qualifies as a holiday since we have to work.)  Some people go all out to the point where you are certain that Target has moved their Halloween department into your neighbors front yard. It is hard to tell if the people coming and going are Trick or Treating, or shopping.  I tend to go to the other extreme and pretend that there is not much special for the day, so I guess it creates balance in the world. Which is always good as long as I get to be Yin and my neighber can be Yang.  For some reason I like the word Yin better.

Even though I do not put much effort into "celebrating" Halloween I do enjoy seeing people in their costumes.  I especially appreciate the people that create their own costumes.  I am shocked by how pricey outfits can be.  I came about this knowledge when I took my daughter to look for an outfit this year. Of course, when you only have one store that sells costumes it tends to drive up the price. (i'll save the capitalism lesson for another time when we all need a good snooze.)  Luckliy, she did not find anything she liked and ended up making her own outfit.  She went as a bag of jellybeans, which I thought was clever and pretty cool.  I liked it much better than the store bought variety of costumes.

You may ask, "what did you learn from Halloween this year?"  Besides the fact that store bought costumes are expensive I learned that you can boil down these store bought items to a couple of categories.  If you're a female you only get one category. Proof that we still live in a male dominated society?  Maybe, you can decide for yourself.  Here are the categories that I was able to detect in the store.
Women's Costumes:  Hooker  now it may come in a variety of subcategories such as Pirate Hooker, Nurse Hooker, Witch Hooker, Princess Hooker, or Fairy Hooker, but at the base of it all they are the same.  A dress that barely covers your butt, and maybe some colorful stockings.  not sure I would encourage my 12 year old to wear them.

Men's Costumes:  you can either be a super hero, or some kind of scary monster type thing. It's possible that those are pretty much one and the same category. Still debating that.

This year for Hallween I decided to do something different. I went to my parents' house.  It's similar to going to a haunted house with the exception being it is open year round, and the horror is much more real.  My sister and I went to see Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo" at The Strand Theater in Marietta.  Enjoyed the movie very much.  Heard one patron state after the movie "I'll view 'It's a Wonderful Life' in a whole new way now."  Jimmy Stewart is the lead male actor in both of these movies, and plays drastically different characters. 

My horror for the evening came when trying to sleep at the home of the parental units.  I was given the room that was my niece's room, and prior to that was my sister's room. (my nephew occupies what used to be my room, and i'm not sure I approve of what he's done with the place.)  This bed I was given squeaks like you're at a mouse convention.  Every time I moved it sounded like I was receiving a hundred telegraph messages all at the same time.  I don't know how anyone ever got any sleep in that bed.  Maybe it's some sort of receiving station for messages from the netherworld, maybe it was used as some sort of poor man's alarm system for when my niece occupied said room. If you breathe hard it squeaks.  Oh the HORROR! 

Needless to say I was my usual cheery self at breakfast  at 645 this morning.  I suppose it made sense to go ahead and get up considering I had been awake since about 1872 and apparently was not going to go back to sleep.

All in all a decent Halloween.  However, with no children around that go trick or treating I have no candy to raid while said children are at school.  I think my nephew could have sucked it up one last year and gone trick or treating for his dear old uncle.  Just because it's his senior year in high school, and it might be embarrassing for him should not matter.  Family first.  Maybe I'll get lucky and he'll be a senior again next year and go trick or treating for me.

OH!  before I forget let me give you the best line from the movie.  First, let me set the scene.  Jimmy Stewart's character is trying to convince the lead female character to change her hair from brunette to blonde.  (I don't bother remembering character names for some reason.)  He said to her "surely, it doesn't matter to you."  when she was resistant to changing her hair color.  Classic.  gotta love the 50s. I am surprised he did not just smack her. that seems to be the usual method for getting women to do what you want them to do in movies from that era.  Good times. (for those female readers I say that all tongue in cheek.)