David Spates "Therefore I Am" Published Oct. 28, 2003

A Dark Lord shouldn't have wrinkled pants

Take it from an old trick-or-treater: Halloween's anticipation is its greatest reward.

Don't get me wrong, the candy is fabulous. There's nothing better in an 8-year-old's life than coming home from a night's tricking-and/or-treating and sizing up the bounty. Look at all of the suckers, the licorice, the fruit chews, the caramel, the chocolate -- oh lordy, the chocolate. Then there's whittling down the selection to a mere parent-mandated six pieces you'll enjoy before going to bed, and then covertly gobbling an extra Snickers moments before bedtime, preferably after you've brushed your teeth. There's no sweeter slumber than that in which chocolate still hangs heavy in your mouth.

As if the candy weren't reason enough for a young lad to enjoy Halloween, there are wonderful decorations, outrageous parties, devilish costumes, the weeks-long sugar buzz. Add to this the joy of telling an adult to smell your feet and give you something good to eat, and it's clear why Halloween is on the short list of kids' favorite holidays.

Ah, but the anticipation is the sweetest nougat of all. As remarkable and astounding as Halloween is, it never quite measures up to a young child's anticipation.

I would mull over my costume choice for weeks. To this day, it was the most time I've ever spent thinking about what I would wear. (No doubt those of you who see me on a regular basis can attest to that.) In a young boy's mind, a costume can make or break Halloween. Pick the right costume and your evening will be set. Pick the wrong one, however, and you can write off the entire holiday. A disastrous Columbus Day? Big deal. A blown-up Labor Day? Whatever. A ruined Halloween, however, can send a child into a severely damaging psychological episode -- at least until Christmas rolls around.

Selecting a costume in my day was a little different than it is today. Back in olden times, retailers didn't stock their shelves with Halloween gear until perhaps the first weekend in October. Today, the Halloween stuff is just one aisle over from the back-to-school section -- a kid has two and a half months to pick out a costume. I can't imagine buying a Halloween costume in late August. Who does that? Kids grow pretty quickly. Buy a costume right before a growth spurt and you can bet you'll be visiting the costume department again before the 31st to trade in your size 4 SpongeBob for a size 5.

I thoroughly enjoyed picking out my costume. They came in boxes with clear-plastic fronts so you could get a peek at the mask inside, but that was all. The entire purchase banked on the mask. Since you didn't see the full costume until you brought home the box, you had to depend on the good folks at Ben Cooper to match a spiffy mask with an equally spiffy costume. The costume company usually came through, but every so often a really great mask was paired with a really dorky costume. Those were the Halloweens you didn't mind wearing the jacket Mom insisted on.

Being the Star Wars geek that I was (well, still am), I often selected costumes from a galaxy far, far away. The Ben Cooper masks looked great, but often the costumes were, well, let's just say they weren't up to George Lucas' standards. The costumes often featured a picture of the character on the chest rather than looking like the character himself. For instance, I went as Darth Vader one year. Great looking mask, as portrayed through the cellophaned box window, but the costume itself was pretty lame. Instead of a rendition of Darth's mechanized chestplate, there was a goofy picture of Darth himself emblazoned across my young torso. It was fun and campy in its own way, but it didn't exactly strike fear in the hearts of neighborhood candy-givers as I had hoped.

The squared pleats in the pants didn't help either. Boxed, store-bought costumes always had square folds in the pants -- not surprising, I suppose, since the costume had been hard-folded into the box months ago and had then endured a sea journey from the factory in Bangladesh or wherever. Understandable, but again, not the menacing look I was after. The Darth Lord of the Sith doesn't have wrinkled pants.

I never was able to figure out how to flatten out the pleats either, since the pants were essentially low-grade industrial plastic threads woven into a "cloth" thinner than New Jersey deli meat. I couldn't even ask Mom to iron them. The iron would have melted Darth's britches, and a pantless Dark Lord is even less menacing than a wrinkled Dark Lord.

Even with all of Halloween's trials and tribulations, it was still the stuff that childhood memories are made of, good and bad. The reality never lived up to the anticipation, but what does? It was fun to tell adults to smell my feet, though.

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David Spates is a Knoxville resident and Crossville Chronicle contributor whose column is published each Tuesday. He can be reached at davespates@chartertn.net.