Half-Arsed Halloween

I love a sunburnt country, a land of sweeping plains, of rugged mountain ranges and celebrations oh so lame…Yep, Halloween in Perth, which our family filled suburb does actually get into (for this hemisphere). It’s stinking hot of course so the kids have to either sweat it out in their animal-themed-onesies, or get eaten alive by mozzies in their too-sexy-for-a-six-year-old witches outfits. The truth is they are mostly dressed in neither, there is just a lot of torn up old clothes with semi-white chalked faces. This really is the lucky country; even the zombies here look fit and well. Kudos to my husband though who went to the enormous effort of making a hole in the bottom of the treat-giving box so when the kids grabbed a lolly, his hand came out and grabbed them with a OOOOOOHAAAAHAAAAA! It was actually pretty frickin scary and the first kid that he did it to completely shat his half-arsed costume (although was it a costume? He was in his high school uniform with a bloody nose and a black eye - I couldn’t even assume it was make up because he looked like the sort of kid that would get punched in the face…a lot).

By the second group of trick or treater’s my gloriously Australian (read apathetic) husband had already run out of spooky steam and didn’t feel like repeating the hand-in-the-box hilarity. ‘It’s too much work’ he said and walked past them to water the garden. For the rest of the night we just had a treat box with a hole in the bottom that hemorrhaged lollies as we walked up the hallway. Despite all this I am a contented supporter of our version of Halloween (although that might be the 17 mini-Twix talking). I would definitely be on Team Bah Humbug if our October 31st exploded into the enormity of the North American celebration. They claimed it and they can have it. I’m happy that our little people got to go to a handful of houses wearing something from their dress up box, see their buddies on the street, and come back an hour later with a bucket full of sugary joy and a smile bigger than their head. Cue happy, innocent, stress free, pressure free, childhood memory. I only hope that in a few years time nothing will have changed and my kids can still do the low-key wander around the neighbourhood knocking for treats, even in their school uniform and after being punched in the face.

This is the doorknob, and the extent of the decorations.

For real