Ice scream queen
The scariest thing about Halloween is the competitive Pinterest Parenting, says Sophie White so this year she is opting out in favour of spooky snacks
If you are a vaguely crap parent, there is nothing that exposes this more than a holiday that demands baking, crafting and decorating. I often think that these Pinterest Parents (usually Mormon home-makers on Instagram, whose bios proudly proclaim their love of family time, pumkpin spice lattes and baby Jesus) walk the Earth primarily to expose our own failings in the field of spawn-raising. It’s just very hard to keep up these days — we’re supposed to have it all and make it all from bloody scratch. We millennial parents have it much tougher than our boomer counterparts. They only had a vague unfocused anxiety about how much they were f*cking-up their kids. We, on the other hand, have an endless scrolling performance of parenthood perfection available to peruse online, and it makes me want to punch my phone.
Parent Instagram can be draining on just your average weekend, when your feed is bursting with people feeling #Blessed, going on #FamilyWalks to get #IceCream and enjoying #FamilyCuddles — where’s the #FamilyDoorSlamming and #FamilyScreaming, I often wonder? Lash a seasonal holiday like Halloween into the mix, and the Parent Instagram ramps up into all-out mania.
It doesn’t help that Halloween, in recent years, has gone pure bananas. It crept in slowly with more and more elaborate costumes, but soon the decorating and Halloweening began to escalate. Now Halloween is nearly
“It doesn’t help that Halloween, in recent years, has gone pure bananas”
as big as Christmas. There are myriad Halloween ‘experiences’ to feel under pressure to bring your kids to. There are haunted houses and pumpkin patches to visit, pumpkin-carving competitions to take far too seriously — basically, Halloween has gone from being a one-night hooley requiring mild parental effort (cover child with bin liner, make holes for the eyes — carefully!) to a week-long extravaganza of magical, spooky memory-making for our kids.
Of course, memory-making for ungrateful children is always fraught, as they persist in making the whole process as difficult and unpleasant as they possibly can. I practically had to bully my older one into his ghost costume (cover child with pillowcase, make holes for the eyes — carefully!). Then, to my horror, I realised that the effort was dire, compared with the high production values of the costumes of the other kids in his school.
This year, I’ve decided to retire from the Halloween over-parenting. Pumpkinpicking? It’d make a cute pic for Instagram, but driving my kids anywhere feels like being trapped in a confined space with rabid hyenas.
I’ll do a little light crafting, and I’ll make these spooky ice-cream treats instead.