'My children and I embrace Halloween for all of it's tackines and creepiness'

Too commercialised or a great time of year? Where do you sit? 

It’s the most wonderful time of the year - With kids trick or treating - And everyone screaming - It’s the most wonderful time of the year!

Forget Christmas, Halloween is where it’s at with my family. Not only is my eldest born on All Hallow’s Eve but I am a morbid horror movie fan from way back. And together, this combines to create a tacky, creepy and over-the-top Halloween cocktail of epic proportions.

The truth is, whether you are like my family, or aren’t the biggest fan, Halloween is getting bigger and bigger each year in Australia. 

Want more TV news? Sign up to Kidspot’s Talking TV newsletter for all the up-to-date news sent straight to your inbox.

The whole family dresses up each year. Image: Supplied

Halloween is a holiday that should be embraced

Department stores have had their shelves adorned with fake spider webs, blood and evil clown masks for months prior to October and their displays are getting larger and larger each year.

When I am admiring the newest additions to the shelves, I often overhear comments from people as they walk by.

 “Not this American celebration again!” 

“It’s all such commercialised crap” 

Or my favourite “it’s just an excuse for candy companies to make money.”  Yep, really…

But for me, all I hear are the sounds of kids (and adults) joyfully pressing the fake scream doorbells and the laughing that follows if and when anyone jumps.

And truth be told witnessing all of this makes my heart and actual mouth smile because while no, none of it really has anything to do with the traditional meaning of Halloween from the history books, and yes, some of it is borderline tasteless and macabre, even inappropriate, the fact is (the majority of the time) it’s fun! Plain and simple. Plus, if you ask me, the tackiness and OTT nature of it all is what makes it so great!

For my family, costumes are critical, without costumes, Halloween just isn’t Halloween.

RELATED: We found the best animated Halloween decoration

Even the house is decorated in the theme. Image: Supplied

RELATED: ‘Entitled’ child’s angry trick-or-treat note

The whole family gets involved - the scarier the better!

This year we are a family of movie killers - Pennywise from IT, Jason Voorhees from Friday the 13th, and Chucky and Tiff (Bride of Chucky) from Child’s play. And boy have we committed to the occasion – we have purchased makeup (including fake scars), wigs, and accessories including a red helium balloon for my daughter’s Pennywise costume and hockey mask and blood-covered machete (fake of course) for my husband’s Jason Voorhees (Friday the 13th) costume.

I may or may not have made a Pinterest board with costume ideas and most definitely do not have saved YouTube makeup tutorials in order to create the perfect Pennywise and Chucky face.

While my costume commitment has definitely moved to a new level this year, we’ve embraced it to a certain degree for a long time – being everything from black cats, devils, skeletons, witches, and pumpkins to ghosts, a hodge podge of Halloween costume tackiness.

But it doesn’t stop at our costumes, we also decorate our house.  We have hand-painted papier mache pumpkins, carved real pumpkins to create jackal lanterns for our front step, stick fake bones into our garden as if a corpse is returning from the dead to greet any guests who arrive and there are fake skulls adorning our mantelpiece. 

Leading up to the day we watch Halloween or family-friendly ‘scary’ movies like Coraline, Edward Scissorhands and Hocus Pocus and we tell each other scary stories and read Halloween-themed books.

And then of course there is our local trick-or-treating that our community really gets into. Groups of children and their families walk around together, saying hi to their ghoulish neighbours, ogling the decorations and displays of other homes and of course enjoying the loot they collect along the way.

Every year my kids and I look forward to Halloween, we mark it on the calendar, and we plan for the occasion as we do for Christmas. While not everyone understands our love for the day, for us, along with it being my eldest’s birthday, for us, it is just a reason to have silly, no questions asked, fun.

Does it matter that it is tacky and commercialised? No. Does it matter that it is ‘dark’ and sometimes a bit tasteless? No, as long as you don’t go to extremes. It's Halloween. It’s meant to be tacky, outlandish and a bit scary. It is meant to be the day when you can be something a bit more sinister than you usually are and get rewarded for it, so why not embrace the occasion?!

I know we will and I for one couldn’t be happier!

Originally published as 'My children and I embrace Halloween for all of it's tackines and creepiness'