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Halloween For Beginners

It's Halloween time, so you Homedaddies will have some of explaining to do. Very young children are confused when a neighbor converts his front yard to a makeshift cemetery, or hangs a bunch of ghosts and skeletons in the trees, or buys a bag of decorative fake cobwebs when his house already has plenty of real ones.

With Halloween, as with all other aspects of Little Kid Culture, it's important to keep things on the warm 'n fuzzy side. The "gross-out" concept of costume design is strictly off-limits. Do not dress your baby up as a severed head, a blood-drooling vampire child, or a wolverine attack victim. Also, avoid all "high concept" costumes; everyone knows it's just you having your own private chuckle. No one's going to believe that she begged to go as the Dancing Dwarf from the "Twin Peaks" dream sequences, or a fugitive drumstick on the run from Colonel Sanders.

I wanted to get Emma her first Halloween costume, but I didn't want to take her to one of those Halloween stores and expose her to twenty thousand square feet of severed rubber limbs, plastic medieval weapons, and injection-molded monster faces more realistic than most nose jobs. I could never explain to her satisfaction how "Scary," a well-known bad thing, can, in this case, also be "Fun," which is "Good." I'm still trying to get her to agree that eating paint is "bad."

I went alone to peruse the merchandise and select her costume, and after much deliberation (five minutes) I went with a proven winner: the Fuzzy White Bunny Suit, made of 100% low-grade spun polyester threads. Non-flammable, if the label is to be believed, although I suspect it would melt like a hairball if you left it in your car on a hot day.

The current conventional wisdom says that you should give young children some time to get used to their costumes. Like wrestling fans, their inability to determine between "real" and "pretend" renders them unstable. Some kids don't react so well to the sudden revelation that everything they've learned so far was just a big mistake, and that from now on they are, in fact, a rabbit.

As luck would have it, Emma loved her bunny suit and began to wear it around the house, which gave rise to a rather fascinating discovery: The spun polyester fabric, in addition to being hot and itchy, also attracts dog hair so powerfully that you can see it flying in from other rooms to attach itself to the suit. Never mind what all that dog hair is doing in our house in the first place.

After two washing machine cycles failed to remove the dog hair, I remembered the Miracle Pet Hair Vacuum Attachment, acquired once upon a time and stored in the attic after one attempted use. Applying it to the bunny suit resulted in another amazing household discovery: The costume picks up dog hair better than the Miracle Pet Hair Vacuum Attachment.

It's a good thing Emma will soon be too big for this costume, because I can hardly wait to try it out on the rug. Meanwhile, I tossed the vacuum attachment out in the front yard. It makes a pretty good tombstone. .

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© Todd Pinsky 1998-2002. All rights reserved.