Halloween costumes now a tricky subject

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 30/10/2017 (2908 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Unless you have been hiding in a drainpipe for the past month, you will know there is only one sleep left until Halloween.

That means you have only a few hours left to figure out what potentially offensive costumes you and your children will be wearing on Oct. 31.

The good news is that I personally visited a pop-up Halloween store the other day and they still had thousands of glitzy costumes available.

The bad news is that, regardless of how you and the kids dress up, chances are you will offend someone, because the politically correct climate we live in is something akin to a (bad word) minefield.

Before we engage in an educational and entertaining discussion about suitable costumes for trick-or-treating, I’d like to point out that I visited the Halloween store to buy several bags of plastic mice to festoon the jack-o’-lantern I created at Carving for a Cause, Kildonan Place Shopping Centre’s annual pumpkin-carving contest for charity.

If enough of you visit the mall’s Facebook page (facebook.com/kildonanplace) and vote for my “Mouse House” gourd before 10 p.m. on Halloween night, I will have a shot at winning another $500 for my charity, the Winnipeg Humane Society. For the record, no actual mice were harmed in the creation of my pumpkin.

Speaking of the humane society, as far as I know, it is still safe to dress up as a puppy or a kitten on Halloween, although endangered pets such as the rhinoceros, the albacore tuna and the spider monkey are definite non-starters.

What you need to know is, Halloween has changed from the innocent days of my youth, when you could wear any cheesy costume you wanted and not offend community standards, because most communities back then didn’t have any standards to speak of.

Today, however, you would not be able to walk around the block in your politically incorrect hobo costume before someone whapped you over the head with a giant novelty Tootsie Roll, which is still one of my favourite Halloween candies.

According to a national poll conducted by marketing research firm Insights West, more than three in five Canadians (63 per cent) believe costumes for children that represent an ethnic stereotype are inappropriate, while 51 per cent feel the same way when it comes to costumes that change the colour of a child’s skin. In the Manitoba-Saskatchewan region, the figures fall to 53 per cent and 46 per cent, respectively.

Nearly half of all Canadians also believe costumes which include a toy or replica weapon, or which represent a culture not the child’s, is also inappropriate. About 40 per cent of Manitobans opposed toting toy weapons.

The point is, you need to be careful about your costumes. Here are a few things it is NOT OK to dress up as:

• Vegetables — You probably think I’m kidding, but this is deadly serious. When I was a kid, we were forced to participate in farm-themed skating shows at our community club, and then my mom would make us wear the same costumes out for Halloween.

This is how I ended up parading around the streets while dressed as a giant carrot and a potato on steroids. Although I was ridiculed by all the other kids dressed as Dracula and Frankenstein, it was politically acceptable to pretend to be a nutritious non-meat food item.

That was before every second person — and most of the people who read my column — became vegetarians. The main point vegetarians are making — in letters wherein they inform me that I am an idiot — is that vegetables are people, too. So do not appropriate the culture of a rutabaga or marginalize a lima bean unless you want to be diced and sliced by some outraged marketing board.

• Shellfish — In the years I was not a carrot or a potato, I was forced to wear a lobster costume sewn by my mom. It is hard to hold a trick-or-treat pillowcase when your hands are covered in huge novelty claws. The big problem, however, is that anyone dressed up as a lobster today would run afoul of East Coast fishers and accused of depleting the stocks of Canada’s most lucrative fishery.

Also, it is extremely dangerous to wander around dark streets with giant feelers on your head and a pot of boiling butter precariously clutched in one claw.

• Dentist or Dental Hygienist — I learned the hard way that these two professions do not appreciate being made fun of. After writing a column in which I suggested dental professionals rejoice in delivering pain with sharpened steel instruments, I received angry letters, emails and phone calls wherein it was suggested that I deserved a serious case of tooth decay, if you catch my drift.
• People who live in any country you have ever been to in your life — You do not want to be accused of demeaning a sumo wrestler, because they will eat all of your candy and twist your limbs until you resemble a pretzel.

 

OK, to help keep you out of trouble, here are a few things you can still pretend to be on Halloween:

• Donald Trump — Let’s face it, even Republicans don’t like Donald Trump. The only ones who will give you grief for dressing up as Trump are the sort of people who don’t “celebrate” Halloween in the first place because they are morally opposed to giving out free candy and believe dressing up as licensed cartoon characters will lead your soul to eternal damnation.
• An honest politician — Because as far as we know, they don’t exist. If you happen to be the minister of the Canada Revenue Agency and are now thinking of subjecting me to a full audit, I was only joking.
• A newspaper columnist — Let’s face it, you can’t be accused of appropriating the culture of someone who doesn’t have any culture to begin with. Just don’t carry a pen, because that could be mistaken for a pointed stick.

 

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca