Pc Police Should Lighten Up For Halloween

Halloween - a holiday mainly for kids and candy manufacturers - has become a target for the PC police.

Some communities around the country are issuing guidelines for parents about appropriate Halloween costumes for kids. In recent years, one school district in my home state of Iowa drew up a list of costumes that children should avoid. The list included Indian princesses, slaves and Gypsies (the fear was that white children would darken their skin); witches; the elderly; the disabled; hobos, and devils. I guess the school fathers felt that if children imitated these groups, they would be making fun of them.

I would think that most kids don’t go in for blackface these days. And putting on a devil’s mask and carrying a pitchfork does not make one a handmaiden of the Prince of Darkness.

I know this will date me, but Halloween once was a home-grown affair before commercialism required kids to have Power Rangers and Pocahontas costumes. You could be a hobo by wearing patchy jeans, a flannel shirt, an old hat and carrying a bandana pouch on the end of a stick. People did not think you were making fun of the poor or the homeless.

Girls were free to dress as witches or as ballerinas or as brides (an effect usually achieved by draping the child in the mother’s curtains). When the girls dressed this way, no one read anything into their actions. The girls were seen as children using their imaginations.

The Iowa school district did give out a list of approved costumes: friendly monsters, animals, food, and famous people or book characters.

That’s all to the good, I guess. I do remember a child appearing at my door with purple balloons taped all over her. “What are you?” I asked. “A bunch of grapes,” she said.

But if your child went as George Washington, would he appear to be portraying a slave owner? If your child goes dressed as a cat, would she be making fun of companion animals? Unless your daughter went out with three other similarly attired girls, would people recognize her as Jo from “Little Women?” And what would you say if a little boy showed up with a penciled-in mustache and a three-piece suit announcing himself to be Johnnie Cochran?

Halloween costumes were even an issue during the 1992 Republican presidential convention. I remember Marilyn Quayle, wife of the former vice president, going on a screed about women and their roles as mothers. Somewhere in it, she inferred that good mothers are home making Halloween costumes for their children, not having careers outside the house.

(Only once did I make a Halloween costume for a child. Melissa wore her tiger suit for most of the next year - everywhere, all the time. I vowed never to do it again, bad mother or not.)

Halloween has been turned into a lesson on political correctness by adults. It’s also the adults who have turned it into a multimillion-dollar commercial venture with elaborate and expensive costumes.

But kids take Halloween for what it is - a one-night affair to dress up in an odd get-up, collect treats from neighbors, and stay up late sorting the sweets out and hoarding them from brothers and sisters. With dawn’s light, it’s back to school and dress as usual with a sugar rush that will keep going until noon.

At this rate, it won’t be long before other holidays come under close scrutiny. Vegetarians already object to turkey at Thanksgiving.

Might Santa be considered taboo - a stranger, too friendly toward children, who abuses reindeer by forcing them to fly?

Let’s lighten up on Halloween before it’s too late.