Halloween is great. There’s candy for everyone, booze for the adults, and slutty nurses, princesses, cats, ghosts, scientists, pumpkins and Lady Gagas roam the countryside. Truly, it’s a magical time of year. And yet, there are some things about Halloween that aren’t so great. Nature has a way of balancing out the good times with the bad. This is because nature is a jerk. And thanks to nature, we all have to deal with these, nine of the worst things about Halloween.
9 Kids
Get off my lawn! No, seriously, get off my lawn. Look, I know that Halloween is supposed to be a night of trick or treating and bowls of candy, while delighted parents take pictures and expect you to coo and fawn all over their adorable children, but here’s the problem: kids are awful. Yes, even your kids. And there’s always one little bastard who looks at you like you just pinched a loaf in his candy bag because you aren’t meeting his spoiled rotten expectations. Look, kid, I just want to get drunk in peace and futilely try to hit on a lady dressed as a slutty elf, which I know sounds confusing, but adult feelings can be strange. Just keep walking to the next house.
8 How Much More Fun It Was as a Kid
On the other hand, I’m fully aware of how awesome Halloween is for kids. You get to dress up like a freak and maraud around the neighborhood like a pirate, collecting candy and vandalizing the homes of jerks who give you raisins. That’s the sort of things kids live for. Sure, it’s a fun time for adults too, but mostly because we just get drunk and try to bone away our sadness, which aside from the costumes doesn’t really make it different than any other weekend. And if you get caught vandalizing someone’s home while wearing a mask as an adult, you don’t get candy, you just get sent to Gitmo.
7 Stupid Tricks/People Trying to Scare You
Look, it’s not April Fool’s Day, so you can calm down, guy at work who spends all day devising irritating practical jokes and then giggling and saying something dumb like, “I guess it’s a trick for you instead of a treat.” And then there’s always one dude who wants to do something borderline psychotic like cutting all the power at the fuse box during the party before jumping out dressed as a werewolf or something and scaring all the ladies, or dressing up a dummy and tossing it off a balcony and screaming for help. Look, just drink this beer, calm down, and try talking to that girl you like instead of terrorizing her like an eleven year-old with gigantism.
6 Slutty Costumes (If You’re a Father)
Wait, what? Hang on, before you go cyber-lynching me, hear me out. Slutty costumes are good. Slutty costumes are, in fact, the best. But imagine being a father of a young lady. Nobody wants to picture their 20 year-old daughter at a frat house on Halloween, grinding on some dude, wearing some skin-tight outfit held together by glitter and sweat. I’m not a father, but I can only imagine that Halloween is the one night of the year when all fathers of party-age ladies feel like stripper dads. And there’s really nothing you can do. You can convince your daughter to dress up like Barbara Bush, but because it’s Halloween, that costume will magically transform into a slutty Barbara Bush costume. George knows what I’m talking about.
5 Looking Like an Asshole
True story: I once had a roommate who was convinced he had the best costume ever. He decided he was going to go to a party dressed as Big Bird, because he figured it would be funny and interesting for whatever reason and that this would in turn make the ladies want to talk to him. But he just looked like an asshole. Everybody snickered and whispered about him, and he ended up feeling so self-conscious that by the end of the night he was just dressed as a sweaty dude in a white-tee shirt and weird bird leggings. You do not want this to happen to you. But sadly, with Halloween costumes, you’re almost always rolling the dice. Chances are you’re going to look like Big Bird. And if you decide to play it safe and don’t dress up, then you’re the asshole who thinks he’s above such things and people will think you’re no fun. As usual, in the end, you’re probably stuck facing a depressing truth: no matter what you do, you look like an asshole.
4 Pretending to Like Other People’s Costumes
The good news, of course, is that as much as you look like an asshole, so does everyone else. The key is to not be the dude who stands out as the Prime Asshole aka the most ridiculous guy at the party. The bad thing, though, is that you have to pretend that all your friends look cool. Yes, Dave, you really do look like the Hulk even though you don’t have any muscles and look more like Kermit the Frog. No, Lisa, all that glitter isn’t giving me an asthma attack, it’s normal for me to cough up gold-flaked mucus. You all look wonderful.
3 Your Home/Yard Gets Trashed
It’s one thing for your place to get trashed because you had a killer Halloween party. That happens. It goes with the territory. But nobody likes to wake up to a yard filled with toilet-paper wrapped around trees, smashed pumpkins and dried egg fouling up the door. And yeah, yeah, it’s a rite of Halloween, and everyone deals with it with a certain amount of good humor because they don’t want to look like the uptight jerk of the neighborhood, but still, let’s not pretend like this anything other than a pain in the ass. Frankly, I blame the Charmin toilet paper bear for glamorizing this sort of thing.
2 Religious People
The absolute worst people to run into on Halloween are the fundamentalist types who want to give you Jack Chick tracts and gibber at you like crazy people about how this is all a celebration of the devil. Rather than politely listen while they talk themselves out, why not try something better, maybe start speaking in tongues because you’re possessed by evil spirits or something? Sure, you run the risk of them kidnapping you for an emergency exorcism, but still, that’s a lot better than having to listen to them preach to you all damn day, and that way you can vomit pea soup on them and nobody will judge you for it.
1 The Hangover
Halloween parties are great. What’s not so great is waking up the next day feeling like someone really did chop your head off with a cleaver. This is why weekday Halloween parties are especially risky. Sure, celebrating Halloween on the actual night feels more festive, but nobody wants to have to roll into work at the ass-crack of dawn sweating gin and smelling like they were just fished out of a distillery’s sewer. It’s best to save that shit for the weekend, when your body expects it, but even then, nobody likes to have to spend a Sunday morning with their head in the toilet, vomiting up pumpkin beer, glitter, and feathers from a Big Bird costume some asshole wore. It’s undignified.