So, yesterday was Halloween. I’ve never been a fan. Perhaps it all stems from the fact that, growing up, I lived in a place that was too far removed from anything to allow for the age old tradition of trick-or-treating…

How old is that, anyway? Fifty years? Sixty? I think maybe some candy company invented it at the end of the 19th century. You know, just like Mother’s Day and Father’s day were invented by the greeting card company, and Christmas was invented by Coca Cola.

Nevertheless, I can always expect a bit of a panic from some direction or other when Halloween comes around, even if I try to keep my distance. This year, there was some constraints on the available time to carve pumpkins. We could not thwart our own tradition, so we had to hurry to get that job done . Seems someone didn’t purchase the pumpkins until it was almost too late.

That would have been me.

Anyway, my youngest son had a great idea for his costume this year. Instead of wearing the normal black cape of a vampire, wizard, or clergyman, he thought he’d be a car. He described it in enthusiastic detail several weeks ago and I, at the time, enthusiastically pointed at the recycling bin filled with cardboard. I also told him to make a plan of some sort and work out what he needed. He enthusiastically agreed, then pulled the biggest pieces of cardboard out of the bin, brought them to his room, and….

Two days before Halloween, I was in the basement chopping up hardboard and gluing it together into a car. Once it was together, I painted it with white primer and left it for him to finish. I had black hardboard circles for the wheels (spraypainted by me), with silver circles for the hubs (painted by him).

It was no masterpiece.

Anyway, upon seeing it, he expressed a bare amount of gratitude and seemed momentarily happy. Then he seemed to settle into a deep funk. Why? Well, he has a bit of a perfectionist problem. That is, he is always disappointed by the reality he gets when compared with his imagination of what he wants, even with the things he makes. I think it’s inherited, although not from me. I’ve long given up any expectation that any reality will manifest in a satisfactory way. I find low expectations lead to the opposite of disappointment. You jump for joy when you discover your newly made drawers actually fit in the chest.

Or I do.

I long for the good old days of simple plastic-bag material Frankenstein monster costumes, with those hard egg-shell thin plastic masks that obscured 98% of your vision. That’s all I ever had to wear for the primary school Halloween parties when I was a kid. That’s all anyone had to wear, for that matter.

Oh, but I remember one guy one year had an elaborate robot costume he’d made (probably with his parents’ help) from cardboard and tin foil. It was a very impressive costume. But were we plastic shrouded kiddies impressed?

No. We thought he was weird.

As usual, there is no moral to this story.