'Tis the spirit of the season

By the time you read this, Halloween will be over, and, for the 25th year in a row, I will have had no trick-or-treaters and I will have had to eat all the candy myself, thus making Halloween the best holiday ever.

Not that I can't buy and eat all the candy I want whenever I want — it's an adult perk — but Halloween candy is better. Everybody knows that.

Even the candy you didn't really like on a regular basis was eaten at Halloween because it was a little gift from a neighbor, or a stranger (in a not creepy way), that you kind of earned for braving the darkness without adult supervision. (Yes, in my day, we went trick-or-treating around the neighborhood in small packs of children without adult supervision. Crazy times, those olden days.)

The candy was always the best part about Halloween, not the costumes, at least not in my world.

Two years stand out particularly well for me as total flops in the Halloween costume department.

In first grade, the first year I was in school — so the first year I attended a school party — my mom made me wear a princess costume. Unlike the dresses she forced me to wear (the woman had some hope in those days that I would grow up to be a real girl), this costume was store-bought.

It was a standard issue costume (read here: cheap) made of shiny, thin, acrylic material (now outlawed in all states) and came complete with a plastic mask held to the head by a thin elastic band that tangled in your real hair in back — because nothing says “you are a pretty, pretty princess, little girl” like a chintzy, highly flammable costume worn awkwardly over your street wear and completely covering your face.

It pulled apart at the seam five minutes after I put it on. I was embarrassed all day. Happy Halloween.

That night, while raiding the neighborhood for treats with my merry band of pint-sized marauders, I wore my ruined costume over my pants and T-shirt but under my coat and winter boots. My knit cap jutted up from behind the princess mask.

All the other kids in my group were equally well-attired and equally torn between gratitude and dismay that our costumes were covered by standard issue Montana winter wear.

Then we saw a ghost.

Not a real ghost ghost, of course, but a kid in a full-length, flowing white sheet with dark eye holes and ragged, dirty edges dragging in the dirt. It must've been a king-size sheet. It revealed nary a stitch of winter clothes, it looked good over his bulky clothes, and if it ripped, it looked better.

Man, was I jealous.

Forget this flammable princess wrapped in layers of woolens stuff, I yearned all year to be a ghost, a real ghost in a white a sheet, flowing and haunting.

What I got the next Halloween was a twin-sized-bed fitted sheet with a not-quite-entirely-faded floral pattern.

My winter clothes were fully visible from the sides. The sheet did not flow behind me along the ground. The ends flapped against my knees in the breeze. If I stuck my arms out straight from my shoulders I looked like a sandwich board advertising a second-hand bedding store. It was ghastly, not ghostly.

The only person haunted by this costume was me, so really, skip the costume and just give me the candy for the win.

(Chocolate anything is preferred at [email protected].)