Why the economy should keep how fun halloween is in check, but didn't

Stupid word of the day - Dutchophobia - n - An irrational fear of the Netherlands and everything Dutch.


Generally, the economy ought to keep halloween at equal levels of fun, no matter how much it fluctuates without totally crashing; my logic is that when it is good, people will have more money and buy more and better candy. However, they will also buy store-bought costumes, which are a snooze. When the economy is bad (such as it is now), people will buy less and cheaper candy, but ought to make their own costumes, which are cheaper and more interesting than the storeboughts. This is known as... well, it isn't known as anything, becaue I just came up with it.

On Friday, I went dressed up as Seymour Krelbourne, from the movie turned musical turned movie musical "Little Shop of Horrors". I am already a nerd, so all I had to do was put on a long - sleeved, patterned shirt, a sweater vest, a dorky, canvas -y jacket, some jeans and a plain hat, then pick up plant puppet we made - voila! Suddenly Seymour.

True, the plant was a little difficult - but it only took us two evenings. Some styrofoam hemispheres, two larger, two smaller, coated in masking tape, the green duct tape, with a hole cut through the middle of the bottom and some spots for my hand. Paint it to look like the plant, attach the entire pod to a dryer vent tube painted green, tape that to some cardboard, mount it in a flowerpot, attach some leaves and pipe-cleaner vines and add some last-minute masking tape teeth - the resemblance was uncanny, and I was able to open the mouth as a puppet and have it eat my candy (it went down into the flowerpot). It may sound complicated, but the entire thing cost less than twenty dollars, and will last for a long time. Plus, everyone loved the costume (except for people who hadn't seen the movie. One person thought that it was an alligator, and another called it a "watermelon parrot". Whatever that is.)

So I had a great costume - I was all ready to see the others that would be prowling the streets. Surely, I thought, things would follow the rule of Halloween economics stated above?

No. There were only a few homemade costumes out and about, most of them in the 3-5 year old male or strollerbound dog groups. Jokers, Commander Codys, and little bloody hockey masks, however, were in no short supply.

So what does this tell us? Well, there are two ways that I interpret it. The first is that we don't know how to save money very well, if we're willing to go out to walmart and buy hundreds of thirty dollar costumes. But the second, and, I think, more accurate, interpretation is that we are lazy dullards. We, as a nation of individuals, don't have the ingenuity or motivation to make a new, creative costume every year, or even once. We just don't think that way anymore. If you need something, you don't make it - you go to walmart! Which is great in some respects - I wouldn't want to make my own bleach - but it makes things that are supposed to be diverse and personal (like costumes) uniform and industrialized. And boring.

I, for one, will continue to come up with new costumes.