Day 125: Halloween Hoopla

In this household, we love halloween.  It also happens to be my birthday.  You know what this means: I’ve had a dress-up party every birthday of my life.

Since we started trying to live a consumer-free, waste-free lifestyle, halloween has been looming like a dark cloud.  What could we possibly wear?  What kind of candy could we give out?

The past few years, Grant and I have put together some serious costumes- some more elaborate than others, but most involving glue guns, material, cardboard, duct tape, and numerous cans of spray paint.  But this year was different.  We weren’t allowed to buy anything, plus we didn’t want to generate any new garbage from supplies we might have had in the house.  Add to that the fact that we had been strapped for time the past couple weeks (ie no time for paper mache), and halloween was starting to look pretty sad.

In the end of course, we pulled through.  Grant re-used his Micheal Jackson Cassette Tape costume, complete with glowing eyes and thriller soundtrack blasting, from a couple years ago.  (You can’t go wrong with inanimate pop culture icons).

Using some leftover face paint (in limited shades) from years gone by, I became a dead skier – maybe not that imaginative, but nice and warm when you’re wandering around outside.

Rhyannon pulled it together at the last minute to become a koodoo cellphone ad (if your city hasn’t been bombarded by this advertising scheme, count yourself lucky and click here to get the reference).  Just to clarify, the reason I’m not smiling in the photo isn’t because I’m unhappy, it’s because I’m in character – hitting your head and then freezing to death ain’t fun.   Rhyannon, on the other hand is ecstatic because she has cell phone coverage without the access fees.   Thanks to Andrea for the sweet photos.

After much deliberation about what out what kind of candy to hand out, we decided to go with cans of pop.  It was something that we could almost guarantee would be recycled by everyone, plus it didn’t come in a plastic bag like most candy.  Not to mention the fact that the kids thought we were awesome for giving out something so big and sugary.

It was a bit disappointing not to have elaborate costumes, but honestly, buy nothing year or not, I’m not sure we would’ve made the time this year.  It was easier to spend two months making paper mache bustiers (no joke) back in the day when we were unemployed or students.

I just have one more thing to mention.  We started off the night on piling onto the skytrain of all things for a packed dance party.  The looks on the commuters faces when a full train full of people in costume and live dj pulled up was priceless.  If you like the idea of public events like this, check out the Vancouver Public Space Network here.

So I hope everyone had a spooky and sugar filled halloween.  I managed not to eat ANY individually wrapped candies, but I did generate some garbage – I discovered that my bottle of liquid latex from a couple years ago had dried into a solid mass, so it, and my fake cut from this year, both went in the bin.  Small price to pay for a good time out.