Halloween casualties

Halloween crept up on me this year -- like so many things do these days -- and I used my unpreparedness as an excuse not to engage with it. OH however loves Halloween, see the 2011 entry, so this year, he's carved a still-green zumpkin and plopped it in the window with a tealight (picture to follow), and Boris the Plastic Skull got dusted off and had mini-bags of Haribo stuck into his eye sockets. There were also satsumas in the Halloween bowl as a concession to healthy eating etc., which must have pleased the mothers and fathers who were again anxiously hovering behind their mostly timid children. 


We must have acquired a certain reputation over the years amongst the local trick-or-treat brigade because we have never been this busy before. I'm sure Boris is partly to blame. One family rocked up with all their children. Their youngest was probably only two years old -- he plucked the gummy bears out of Boris's eyes without even so much as a "sorry, mate". His four-year-old sister, however, had obviously already mentally acquainted herself with the terrifying finality of death but had not got round to erecting the kind of psychological defences (e.g. belief in an afterlife, denial, Prozac, alcohol) that adults resort to -- so she burst into tears at the sight of Boris lurking in his bowl and had to be comforted by her mother. "My first Halloween casualty of the year," OH reported proudly.

According to him, zombies were very much in fashion this year, which doesn't surprise me at all. Recession Halloween means families no longer drop dozens of pounds at the supermarket for two or three crappy little outfits that the kids will have grown out of by next year. No, it's back to charcoal face paint and ketchup blood on old, torn school uniforms. And in any case, the little ones are only preparing us for what's round the corner. Even the United States government is using the jolly pretext of preparing for a "zombie invasion" to test a variety of civil defence scenarios. Only they don't mean zombies. Every film student and their dog knows that mass zombie attacks in film are code for real-life proletarian uprisings and forced expropriations -- "eat the rich" -- so it's nice to know that a supposedly democratically elected government is using taxpayers' money to prepare for the moment when the 99% are coming to take what's rightfully theirs.

The school-age zombies were incredibly bourgeois though -- after 8pm, we didn't get a single Trick-or-Treater so they must have either gathered round a freshly slaughtered pensioner, or they'd been sent upstairs by their parents to get ready for bed and were probably brushing their little zombie teeth.