Halloween parties and parades

My Zomboni from Plants vs. Zombies costume came out great. I painted the Zamboni design on white fabric with cheap tempera and tied it over my lap. A cardboard box would have made it too awkward to wheel myself around the neighborhood. Another section of white sheet was draped behind the chair back to make the Zomboni’s ice trail! Only one person recognized the costume from the game. She pointed and laughed and gave me the thumbs up. Other people, well, I have no idea what they thought!

Oblomovka was Crazy Dave from Plants vs. Zombies. No one recognized it and most people said things like “Oh! You’re a POTHEAD!”

Or “spilled breakfast.” One tiny kid pointed and screamed “Pan on the head! Pan on the head!!!” So I’d say it was a successful costume.

Moomin’s The God Horus costume came out well too. For his dance studio’s party, he left off the double crown of the Pharoahs of Egypt, but was still cheered as a finalist in the party’s costume contest!

I love to make costumes and to see how people dress up. The quality of store-bought costumes has really improved since I was a kid. The only year I remember having a boughten costume (as Laura Ingalls would say) it was a trash-bag-thin piece of plastic with a skeleton printed on it.

Over the last few days I’ve been to Egypt Day, Oblomovka’s daughter’s school Halloween Parade, Moomin’s dance studio’s party complete with home-made haunted house in a tent, trick or treating up and down Cortland Avenue in Bernal Heights, and then a long night of handing out candy as swarms of kids ran around in the dark. Tonight there’s a Dia de los Muertos parade in the Mission, so I’ll don the Zomboni costume one more time!

The school parade was very old school. All the kids walked around a small blacktop courtyard while the principal or someone yelled muffled things through a bad PA system. The best part was when all the superheros and ninjas were called into the center of the courtyard to pose for a photo. Instead they piled on top of each other in an epic melee.

The Bernal party was great though I have never loved the idea of going up and down a street or a mall full of businesses. Half the point of the holiday is getting to knock on doors of strangers and neighbors, to feel that everyone is generous and to peek inside their houses. I also like how many people who don’t have kids enjoy this holiday and dote on the children in their cute costumes. This still happened in Bernal, in fact, it happened so much that we gave away two bags of candy, some Twizzlers (unwrapped) and Oreos and a bag of marshmallows (also unwrapped) and then were reduced to handfuls of coins from the change jar. The main drag with businesses was friendly too but because it was so crowded, felt less free and easy. I was happy to see a lessening of unwrapped-candy paranoia, as I was given handfulls of jellybeans, cookies, and apples.

Here are some other highlights of Halloween:

A small, charismatic police officer:

Dance performances:

The head-on-a-platter costume:

And Moomin (not in costume) heading off on Halloween morning on a bus with his entire 6th grade class, on a camping trip!