It’s Halloween.
But I don’t want be a ghost this year, please. Not a pretend one and definitely not a real one either. Instead I think I’ll wear bright clothes and disguise myself as a really healthy person.
Our pumpkins are going to look completely different this Halloween too. After their special makeover, they are now only the tiniest bit ‘ugly’. Their arrival a few days ago had felt like such a great opportunity for me to improve their appearance, then mine. Because the truth is that I do not (yet) have much experience in successfully putting make-up on my own face. I have learned something valuable again today then. For weeks I had sensed that that I would probably need to work on a talent for creating beauty pretty much from scratch: now I am absolutely sure.
Still, the pumpkins do at least have wonderfully surprised expressions. This was the result of me wanting them to have lovely, perfectly average eyebrows, with 250 hairs in each. They are also lucky enough to have 90 felt-tip pen eyelashes on each top lid and 70 on the bottom. I am trying to make the world a fairer place, I guess.
Unfortunately, a problem has come up. The Halloween sweets have already been eaten by us. I don’t know why (or how) we did that a day before Halloween rather the day after. This is going to be awkward. Particularly since the Halloween decorations in our front garden and at the windows are likely to attract (disappointed) Halloween trick-or-treater for miles around.
As a family, we may have to come up with an emergency Halloween plan. Offering people apples and rice cakes might not go down very well at all. Even if (or especially if) these could have interesting faces drawn on them with a felt-tip pen. Social distancing should be observed too, and this is a further complication. So we might have to throw apples and rice cakes which would be even worse. Alternatively, we could insist that we simply can’t hear or see ghosts and monsters at our door, as we don't believe in them? Or we could avoid the issue entirely and go out as trick-or-treaters ourselves for the whole evening (in a storm)?
So far, this might be our best idea: We could open the door to the first set of trick-or-treaters and politely announce that the rules for Halloween have been changed this year. (Yes! How exciting!) For example, they are supposed to give us sweets, thank you, not the other way round! Then when the second set of trick-or-treaters arrive, we can trade sweets with them. Hopefully, we could carry on like that all evening, simply swapping sweets! That would be friendly and democratic.
Ah, good thinking, everyone!
