Trick-or-Treat: Happy Halloween 2015

Tomorrow is the last day of the Write 31 Days challenge and it is also Halloween. Or maybe I should say it like this: Tomorrow is the last day of the Write 31 Days challenge and it is also Halloween!

All occasions and holidays have their own ambiance, don’t they? Halloween is supposed to be scary and frightful. It certainly can be! I have always felt that Halloween should be these four things:

safe

simple

fun

hilarious

I haven’t been able to enjoy too many Halloweens these past several years, but I plan on enjoying this one. We are going to see our grand girls, and the baby is going to be one of my personal favorite characters, Raggedy Ann. Her mother sent me a photograph this morning of trying on the costume; she said grandbaby loves the wig! Last year, when the baby was only twelve months old, she was Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz; she cried because her dress felt itchy–it didn’t last long. She did, however, love the ruby slippers Grandma bought her. She wore those long beyond her first Halloween.

In just one year, it appears her imagination and tolerance has developed.

Seeing the photograph of our grand baby dressed as Raggedy Ann made me think of two other costumes I saw on Facebook…The Crazy Cat Woman and Cruella De Ville (sorry, I can’t credit the photographers..I just saw these as loose shares)…

 

I have never been one to have much of an elaborate costume for Halloween. It seemed I was always too busy to spend much time fussing over it. The years I tried to get elaborate, I had more trouble making the costume than it was worth. One year, I tried to make my daughter a Little Mermaid costume, and I got so busy at work that I was still hemming the skirt when trick-or-treaters were ringing the doorbell. Even though I had picked the perfect fabric, running so far behind made me feel like a failure. I vowed to myself to simplify in the future.

It’s nice to have a great costume, but the focus is really on the celebration and the fun, or it should be. Here are some of the simple costumes I created over the years for myself to wear, using what I had available in my own wardrobe:

a hippie

a go-go girl

a nun

a farmer

a pregnant woman

The pregnant woman was one of the last costumes I wore before suffering an acquired traumatic brain injury in 2007. It was the easiest costume to put together, since I had an old maternity dress and a nice, big squishy pillow that I could anchor under my pantyhose. I got the idea to go as pregnant because my daughter’s boyfriend had a costume of a pimp, which I am pretty sure he and my daughter did not know the meaning of since they were still in high school; it was just one of those inexpensive ready-made costumes that they probably knew had some forbidden meaning. We needed something for my husband to wear, so he borrowed my daughter’s boyfriend’s costume (which may have belonged to the boy’s father, possibly), and we went to the party as a pimp and his pregnant girlfriend.

Because you know, Halloween.

Everyone else at the party also wore simple costumes, but they all worked well enough, and together we made a pretty ghoulish crew. We had a lot of fun that night, but we usually did whenever we got together.  One couple brought with them a plastic monster–for whatever reason–because they had it? I guess to be scary. He had a name, which I’ve forgotten now. Maybe I was even the one who named him.

We were enjoying visiting with our friends, laughing and talking.  The grim reaper you see above and I started acting out a scene of an obstetrician attending the delivery of a baby: that is, ahem, me trying to birth the monster…which of course, as parents, we all thought was pretty sassy.

Believe it or not, we were not drunk! We were just having fun, being silly. I have long had a stand up comic routine I do about giving birth, which magnifies the experience as comedy does, but also illustrates how labor feels so much worse than it looks. I act out the physical pain and the voices of the doctors and the nurses, who can say some pretty funny things in their urgent ways. So that is part of what I am doing in the videos you see here (linked below), where I am both the nurse (telling the mother to PUSH) and the mother trying to deliver the baby:

MVI_1083.m4v

MVI_1084.m4v

Oh, the hilarity!

The best thing about Halloween is that you can have so much fun, just getting wild with your friends.

That, and of course, the candy!

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I hope you have enjoyed reading Stumbler. One more day to #31!

This is Day 30 in the 31 Day Writing Challenge, 31 Days of Breaking Free from Fatigue

#write31days

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