Halloween – it’s time to get REALLY scared

Seven billion dollars? I mean – SEVEN BILLION DOLLARS??? Not mentioning all other nations infected by Halloween craze. Seven billion dollars spent on candy and costumes (mostly plastic, China-made and ugly as hell)??? Is it just me, or has the whole world gone bonkers?

Let me give you a few examples of what you can buy for that kind of money:

- Seven billion dollars roughly equals 7 billion kilograms of rice, which, as you probably know, is enough to give one kilo to every single inhabitant of our planet – both those who starve and those who don’t. If you focused on the ones suffering from starvation and malnutrition, the ratio would jump to almost 10 kg per head.

- Seven billion dollars roughly equals 50,000,000 Kindle readers or 14,000,000 middle-shelf Dell laptops

- Seven billion dollars can be changed into about 23,000 ’09 Maybachs, or 140,000 ’11 BMWs

And so on.

Did I hear somebody saying we have worldwide recession?

Once upon a time, I worked in a card shop. Mind you, the place wasn’t even particularly party-orientated, it carried mostly greetings cards and the likes. Unfortunately, come Halloween, the temptation of earning extra buck proved too strong to resist to my former employers. The shop was nearly flooded with all sorts of costume kits and accessories. I’ve had a good chance to have a close look at both quality of those costumes and their popularity with spending public. My conclusions were grave.

1. Most of the costumes are produced of cheapest materials possible – polyester thin as a cobweb and plastic. This fact has nothing to do whatsoever with their prices – kits with price tag of more than 100 euros were still made of polyester and plastic, only more of it. The way things are today, to have your costume properly tailored out of some decent fabric (one that would survive first washing, for example), you would have to spend thousands.

2. Most of the costumes are marked ‘one size fits all’ or manufactured in 2-3 sizes only. Now, think of all the different people you see and how different they are when it comes to body shape. There’s as many Roseanne Barrs as Angelina Jolies in this world and ‘one size fits all’ somehow doesn’t sound convincing. I would say a Terry Pratchett’s phrase instead – ‘one size fits nobody’ is more valid here.

3. Regardless of the above, in my particular shop (and I have no reason to think that all other shops are any different) the costumes sold like fresh bread rolls.

Which, overall, is probably the saddest part.

I wonder how much outrage will I cause with this paragraph, but Halloween candy-terrorism simply has to be mentioned here.

I don’t have any children as of yet, and although I couldn’t find any proper statistics on the Web, I’m quite sure that there’s many child-free people in this world. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against children, let them be, but especially if they are somebody else’s children – let them be somewhere where I am not.

I protest against Halloween candy terrorism! Once upon a time I lived in a semi-detached house with quite a few children in the neighbourhood. What options do you have on this lovely evening when you hear knocking at your door?

1. Opening the door and saying nicely that you don’t participate will get you rotten eggs on the doorstep

2. Opening the door screaming and threatening with the police could only get you collectively hated in the neighbourhood, and while I could live with that, I wouldn’t want to traumatise the kids – after all world’s consumerism is not the little buggers’ fault (yet).

3. Turning off all the street-side lights and spending the evening quietly at the back, completely ignoring all the knocks. It works all right, and it’s exactly what I used to settle for in those days, but it did leave me with a slight feeling of uneasiness (and, not slight at all, anger) – why on Earth should an adult person, in a so-called free country, result to such means?

Living in an apartment block with number-coded lock on the main gate is a good solution to candy terrorism, although I would hardly expect anyone to choose a dwelling for this particular quality only :)

Whatever the advertisers try to feed you with, most of Halloween decorations and costumes are NOT pretty, sexy, classy etc. Most of the stuff is tacky, ugly, unimaginative and looks awfully cheap. Go outside on Halloween evening to see for yourself.

I’m sorry if you believed otherwise and I’ve just shattered your dreams, but when you think about it, reality is not such a bad thing after all…

Just if you were wondering, I believe there’s nothing wrong with Halloween itself. Ok, maybe almost nothing… But nothing I couldn’t live with, if you took all the marketing hype out of the picture.

I love the imagery of Halloween, all those ghouls and witches, dark side of the year etc. etc. A candle-lit evening with hair-raising ghost stories and pumpkin pie in the intervals? Wonderful! A good book full of hags, vampires and apparitions? Anytime!

Red-clad devil in badly fitting mini-dress and plastic horns made in China? No thank you, I’d rather pass…

One more little story. During my last visit to the local post office, I was greeted with the full set of Halloween decorations of rather tacky quality (the Big Day still being at least two weeks away). I shuddered with disgust but then, to my joy, I’ve discovered a little miracle – at the front window, between the awful, cotton wool-ish fake cobwebs and plastic mega-spiders, one small real spider happily hung. I couldn’t help smiling.

There’s still some authenticity left in the world, even if represented by a humble spider :)