Every Day is Halloween – what does your costume say about you?
As a child growing up in the 50s and 60s in the US, I loved Halloween. Apart from the fun of dressing up and going out for trick-or-treat, it was also my father’s birthday (he would have been 90 years old today if he were still alive), so my mother always bought a really fancy bakery cake every Halloween in honour of Dad’s birthday. After many years of having the same type of cake year in and year out—orange and chocolate layer cakes smothered with sugar jack-o-lanterns, black cats and witches—he finally rebelled and asked to have a “normal” birthday cake instead. But as far as I was concerned, I loved the fun of my father’s Halloween birthday cakes every year.
Apart from being the one day of the year where parents surrender all attempts to keep their children on a healthy diet, Halloween is also the day where we, both children and adults, get to dress up and make believe we are someone or something else for a day. What we choose could be our alter ego, our wildest fantasy or our scariest nightmare. I believe we can often learn a lot about ourselves by looking back at what we wanted to be on Halloween when we were children.
What do our Halloween costumes reveal?
I remember the very first Halloween outfit that I selected for myself when I was about 4 years old. Continue Reading…
