I hate Halloween.  Hate it.  Like on a scale of 1 - 10, where 1 is love it and 10 is hate it, I'm a 15.  And, I hate it on more than one level.  I hate it on many levels.

First of all, I hate the dressing up part.  I don't 'get' what's so fabulous about dressing up as a rocker chick or an eighty's girl.  I don't get what's so fabulous about getting dressed up at all.  I don't want to be a cow or any other barnyard animal.  I don't want to be a ghost or a goblin.  I don't want to be a cat or a mouse.  I want to be me.  That's it.  Just me.  All day, every day.  Dressing up, to me, is just plain silly.  It makes me feel silly. 

Not only that, but it seems that these days, you can't just dress up as a cat...you have to dress up as a sexy cat.  If you're an angel, you're an DD cup angel with wings.  Halloween seems to have become an excuse to dress like a hooker.  Police women do not wear 5inch stiletto boots - it's not very practical - they'd have a hell of a time chasing a perp in those.  Nurses don't wear mini skirts - because just your luck - it would be a 60 year old nurse in that mini skirt and she'd be bending over to pick up her pen.  Nothing about Halloween is realistic. 

Mostly, though, I just hate being scared.  I hate it.  I hate that feeling when someone jumps out of a dark closet and yells, "Boo!"  I hate ghosts and goblins and devils and vampires.  I've never watched a horror movie (unless you count the Blair Witch Project...but that was just stupid.)  I don't like haunted houses or bumps in the night.  There are enough scary things to worry about in every day life, like germs and drunk drivers and bugs...I don't need 'fake' things to worry about, too.

Crazy though it is, for as much as I hate Halloween - I have a six year old who loves it.  The other day he asked me why he gets a day off school for Christmas and Easter, but not for Halloween.  It made me stop and think that maybe I'm not teaching/stressing enough the reasons for Christmas and Easter.  Until he asked, if Christmas was Jesus' birthday, who's birthday was Halloween. 

So, instead of sitting at home in the dark with the doors locked (don't laugh...this is what I remember doing when I was younger...my father also hated Halloween...) I've chosen to make it an opportunity for Q and I to make memories together.  Hopefully, memories that will last him well into adulthood and make up for some of the screw ups I'm sure I have/will need to make up for by the time he is an adult.  Each year, he picks what he wants to be and I make it for him.  Well, we make it together...but really, I make it.  I try to let him help, really I do...but at some point, I inevitably push him aside, saying, "Here, let me do it..."

This year he decided that he wanted to be a skeleton.  So, a skeleton he is...actually, he's a glow in the dark skeleton....



The "bones" are foam painted with glow in the dark paint.  And yes, I did cut out each and every little bone... 

You can kinda see the refection from the paint in this one... 



Something about being a skeleton that makes you wanna be scary, I guess.



I was going for a smile here, he switched it out for this at the last possible second. 

Next year, he wants to be a ghost which I'm really super excited about  because it will be very simple, like  slap on a white bed sheet and we're good to go, like way easier than last year's shark.  I'm pretty sure I sewed my fingers together at least twice last year, and there was blood and curse words on numerous occasions.  This year, only one minor burn from the glue gun, and I think I only swore once...or twice...