kicking puppies is bad

Halloween has always been one of my favorite holidays. As a child it was an excuse to dress up in ridiculous costumes and eat insane amounts of candy. And really, what could be more fun than that? I understand that Halloween originated from the pagan holiday Samhain. I understand that Halloween wasn’t originally a celebration of gluttony and ridiculousness. But that is what Halloween has always been to me. And I love it.

Around the time I went away to college, Halloween took a disturbing turn. Halloween started to become an excuse for girls to wear fishnets or leather pants. I don’t get it. How does adding a headband with cat ears to your miniskirt/fishnets combo turn into a cat costume? What do fishnets have to do with cats? It appears that you can add animal ears to any ridiculously trampy outfit and that is an acceptable costume. Some of these are marginally passable (e.g. rabbit ears make sense to me because of the whole playboy bunny thing). Other animal costumes that I encountered this past weekend make less sense to me. Naughty Bumble Bee?

I did a quick Google search for “naughty bumblebee” so that I could include an image of this monstrosity in this post. I was sort of shocked to find that there was a vast array of “naughty bumblebee” costumes. In fact, one site had 8 naughty bumblebees and 5 naughty ladybugs under the “sexy bug” heading. It also seems like you can now add “naughty” to any profession and come up with a Halloween costume (although I haven’t yet seen “naughty actuary” or “naughty lunch lady”). I seem to be missing something. I don’t get when Halloween turned into a holiday about sex instead of candy.

Because of this disturbing trend, I made it my personal mission to pick the unsexiest costume I could find. There would be no leather pants, no fishnets, no bare skin and no pigtails. Nothing would be clingy and nothing would be revealing. I went to the fabric store and picked up yards and yards of fabric. I got out the sewing machine and magically created a giant pink unsexy love-a-lot CareBear costume (actually I made the CareBear for Halloween two years ago, but pulled it out of my closet for a party last weekend because I was too lazy to make anything else). My costume was cool (and completely not sexy). Last weekend when I was at a Halloween party in San Francisco, the second comment I got was “a furry!”. Apparently even CareBears are sexy to some people. I really can’t win.