Halloween

I looked up 'best Halloween costume' on Google Image Search, and I saw a lot of half naked fatties. Please enjoy this image of a pumpkin.

In my experience, holidays take on new meanings as the years go by. Christmas used to be all about the presents, but as I got older and moved out, it’s become less about shameless materialism and more about seeing my family, something I never would have guessed in spite of the fact that that’s the moral of virtually every story ever written about Christmas.

My appreciation of Thanksgiving has increased exponentially with my newfound appreciation of turkey and stuffing over the past five years or so, and my birthday, which had gone through sort of a lull after I turned 18 and could finally buy porn and lottery tickets, was especially enjoyable when I turned 21 last year. But it’s Halloween, more than any other holiday, that I’ve discovered a newfound appreciation for.

I was never totally nuts about candy as a child, so when I did go trick-or-treating it was more out of a sense of social obligation than interest in sweets – if people had been handing out garlic bread or meatloaf on their doorsteps it would’ve been a different story. But still I pressed on, every year struggling to think up a new costume and then trudging from one house to the next, accumulating more candy than I could hope to eat, miserably sleepwalking through a major childhood social function like some pint sized, overweight Jay Gatsby.

I quit Halloween altogether in fourth grade, which at the time was a lot like trying to tell your Southern Baptist friends that you’re gay. “No, guys, I don’t want to run around the neighborhood dressed as Power Rangers, demanding free sweets from adults. I’d rather sit at home and watch Seinfeld.”

I’d turned my back on the holiday pretty much entirely until I got to college, where the band’s annual Halloween costume contest pulled me back into the raucous, child-oriented activity in the way that only the Oregon Marching Band can.

Prizes in the costume contest are awarded for the best single costume and the best section-wide coordinated costume, and traditionally these prizes are awarded based entirely on favoritism, making the promise of an award less a tangible goal and more a good excuse to convince all your friends to dress up like characters from Super Smash Brothers.

The fact that they’re in a marching band is the least nerdy thing about this picture.

After abstaining from the festivities my freshman year, I got my feet wet sophomore year by showing up to the costume contest dressed normally while wearing a novelty arrow through the head.*

*After practice, I wound up leaving the arrow in my then-girlfriend’s dorm room. When we broke up a few weeks later there was a somewhat bittersweet moment when I had to stop by to pick up my stuff from her place and she met me at the door with a Kurt Vonnegut book, my DVD of Dawn of the Dead, and a slapstick comedy prop.

Last year, I cobbled together a suitable Team Zissou uniform as a tribute to The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, which I was very proud of in spite of the fact that absolutely nobody understood it.

From left to right: Long story, Santa, Iron Man, Balloon Boy, Team Zissou.

This year, for the first time in perhaps ever, I’m considering doing multiple costumes, which I think is impressive considering the fact that when I was the intended age for this holiday I found it too stressful to come up with so much as one. Right now I’ve got at least three Halloween parties on tap, which means that I can pull out both David Caruso on CSI Miami as well as Doogie Howser in pretty much the same weekend, plus Kenneth the Page if I can find an NBC tie.

I can’t figure out why I’ve only started embracing the spirit of the holiday now, when I’m well beyond the culturally accepted age for such shenanigans. Maybe it’s because Halloween as my friends and I celebrate it now doesn’t involve trick or treating for candy, but instead trying to one up your friends’ creativity for attention, which is essentially the greatest candy money can buy. Unless we’re counting alcohol as candy.

Incidentally, I would gladly go back to trick or treating if you knocked on doors and people gave you little one shot bottles of Absolut, or just baggies filled with scotch or whatever they happened to have in the liquor cabinet at the time. Admittedly, one night of strangers giving each other free alcohol would probably bring about the downfall of Western society, but I feel like it would be worth it to drink Jack Daniels out of a water balloon.

Truman Capps has really given up on trying to hide his love of booze on his blog – if any potential Hollywood employers reading this have a problem with mind altering substances, judge not lest ye be judged.