Whose Halloween is it, anyway?

This was written in reaction to a Facebook friend asking me to explain this status update: Anne is saying a society that pressures grownups to wear costumes to work and tells preschoolers not to wear costumes to school has its priorities mixed up!

(While I commend my colleagues for the creativity and energy they throw into Halloween at work, I just don't have the time or energy to do it justice most years. Really, this is all about my sense of guilt. Don't want to be a Halloween grinch or Eeyore, but I find it stressful enough to squeeze time into our busy schedule for outfitting three kids in costume without having to find a creative one for myself. I did pull off two pumpkin patch visits, a daytime tour through The Reaper's, and a theatre production (The Great Big Boo) plus some really fun trick-or-treating with our friends!)

There's a huge culture of dressing up for Halloween at UCFV among staff, especially on the Abbotsford campus where they have a huge party, but in Chilliwack too on a smaller scale.

(A lot of the people who get excited about this have grown children so don't face the Halloween pressures us working mums do.)

Sometimes I manage to throw something together out of our tickle trunk, but I just don't usually have the time or energy to do an elaborate costume for myself after tending to the kids' Halloween needs on top of the regular general chaos of our lives.

The one time we got to Value Village this month I had the four-year-old with me and it was his bed-time, so had to run herd on him while the girls tried to peruse in a leisurely manner.

My boss had a good-hearted idea for us all to be punctuation marks. My colleague Patty and I, the Chilliwack contingent of our department, were to be "en" and "em" dashes, since people often confuse us with each other.

But neither of us owned black clothing to put the white punctuation marks on, and Patty had a hippie costume already, so she wore that.

I dug through the tickle trunk this morning, but had one kid needing help gathering her science experiment material, and another needing orange clothes for Orange Day, and a husband with a 9 am meeting, so I ended up pulling out the old orange shirt for the token Halloween colours.

Was also going to be taking my daughter to the doctor at lunch time and thought I would feel funny talking about possible face fractures (she fell on her face) dressed as a clown, or hippie, or gypsy, or earth mama.

So that's it. Hunkered down in my office as the Halloween Eeyore.

But had fun trick or treating with my kids tonight, which is what it's all about.

Anne