Get back to old style Halloween
FEELING crafty this week, I say to the kids: “Let’s make our own Halloween costumes this year?”
I was expecting a big “hurray”. Instead I get blank faces and a look of disdain: “No way mom’.
I urge them to call me mammy but they get mom from the telly!
They utter: “How are we supposed to make our own witches?”
My eldest Erin has visions of sewing for hours and protests that making our own will be too tough to muster. She is six after all and Eila is four. “Costumes online are more expensive than a Ralph Lauren top so we aren’t going there, it’s wasteful,” I say.
We’ve been buying the Lastminute Larry rigouts at the discount supermarkets for years and I explain that now it’s time to get “creative”.
They reiterate how all their friends buy their outfits, again I put my foot down and say, “It’s okay to be different girls”.
Keeping up with the Joneses is already a thing at their age.
But all week we’ve been coming up with ideas and the girls are starting to warm to the idea.
I was Googling how to make your own witch and was rather shocked at the sexy X-rated stuff I saw aimed at kids. What
six-year-old wears fishnets? We’ve lost the plot when it comes to Halloween; it’s out of control.
It’s become too Americanised and commercial, just like Christmas.
Surely Halloween should be less about eating thousands of jellies and more about tradition?
Going back to basics and reliving my youth is my aim this year.
“In our day we made ghost costumes from old sheets”, I say.
The girls love saying I’m from “the olden days”.
Reminiscing, I tell them that one year I dressed up as a rubbish bin, sticking tea bag boxes and milk cartons to a black sack, to create the look. They recoil in horror. “But did you not smell bad mammy?” Fond memories of apple bobbing and homemade tea brack spring to mind.
Our mam would hide a gold ring wrapped deftly in greaseproof paper, buried in the tea brack.
Oh the simple pleasures and the innocent joy.
Nowadays we follow those Stateside, with ostentatious house decorating and overpriced tat we bought online, that will be binned soon after Halloween.
It’s time to go back to basics and reuse, recycle and create.
Halloween’s origins date back to the ancient festival of Samhain.
Some 2,000 years ago the Celts made it famous.
The day marked the end of the summer and the beginning of the dark, cold winter.
We, the Celts, believed that on the night before the new year, the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead were blurred.
The ghosts of the dead returned to Earth.
It’s time to reclaim our heritage and bring back the old values with a bit of Make and Do Nostalgia.