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The problem is that when she brings home a bag of limited edition Vanilla Flavored Tootsie Roll Midgees, I end up eating more of the sweet stuff than she does. (Granted, this is mostly because she has a lot more self-control than I do; she likes the candy, but also takes much better care of herself than the person whose rounder-than-it-should-be face I see when I look in the mirror while applying liquid latex and fake blood Halloween morning.) Because I like to consider myself a good husband, I try to replace what I eat, and because I find it easier to shop online, I typically look for bags of Halloween on eBay or Amazon.

Doing a search for "halloween kit kat" on Amazon led me to a page of mostly candy and toys.

And something called the "Kit-Kat Sexy Woman's Costume Adult Halloween Outfit"-blah-blah-blah.

Really?

Look, I know I'm not the first one to make the observation that Halloween seems to be the time of year a LOT of people choose to, to put it bluntly, dress like a slut. (Not that the "Kit-Kat Sexy Woman's Costime-blah-blah-blah is particular slutty.) Playing dress-up is fun, I'm sure, but . . . really?

In grade school, I dressed up as a pirate, as Zorro, as a robot or even as Boba Fett, but somewhere along the way, I was exposed to monsters. I can't pinpoint the year I discovered them, but there was a series of thin hardback books with black-and-white front covers and orange back covers devoted to movie monsters. The Universal stable was well-represented, as were a handful of non-Universal-but-still-classic movie monsters - Godzilla and Mad Scientists were amongst the books' titles. These books told the story of these classic monsters, and even went into detail about the production of the films. Sometime between 2^nd and 5^th grade, I learned who Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff and Lon Chaney, Jr., were; I discovered there were silent films called Nosferatu and The Golem; I realized who Jack Pierce was. I started drawing pictures of monsters during class, filling notebook pages with giant monster faces (for some reason or other, I was fascinated with drawing scars on these faces, drawing them into the monsters' eyelids - I can't remember why!). Art projects often times ended up including skeletons, bats and giant snakes.

If I had been born just a few years earlier, I suppose I would have been called a "monster kid."

Somewhere along the line, I got it stuck in my head that Halloween should be about celebrating the monster, and even wrote a paper in grade school condemning those who chose to dress up as princesses and other non-scary things, accusing my fellow grade schoolers of not "getting it" and that Halloween should be used to celebrate Lugosi, Karloff and Chaneys, Jr. and Sr. I don't remember what kind of grade on earned on that paper. I do remember one of my teachers being amused by one of onster drawings.

I remember when I finally saw a monster movie. It was Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein, and I was at my best friend's house across the street. It was on TV on a Saturday afternoon, and I was transfixed. I had seen pictures from the movie. I knew the story inside and out at this point, but to finally SEE the movie? It was as close to a religious experience a kid beneath the age of 12-or-so might have.

Over the years, I've dressed up as different monsters and creatures for Halloween. This continued through junior high school, high school and college. I would set my alarm for 5:00am knowing that it would take several hours to put on my make-up before heading to class or work for the day, and then wear the make-up throughout the day and into the evening. And a year in which I had an opportunity to dress up more than once for multiple Halloween parties or events? It was another near-religious experience for me.

And all the while, I watched others around me dress up as nurses, professional wrestlers, Star Wars characters, and yes, princesses.

I still don't get it. I mean, on some levels, I suppose I really do. I realize that horror movies, and by extension, the trappings of horror movies - like dressing up as a monster - aren't going to be everyone's cup of bloody tea. But it's just one day. It's one day to explore whatever dark or twisted or fantastic imagery we normally keep bottled up inside, and why someone would chose to dress up as a football player on a day when it would be perfectly acceptable to dress up as a zombified pizza delivery man is something I've never been able to quite figure out. (Sometimes to my detriment, I'm sure. One year the girl I was dating, wearing a black cat costume, approached me in a dark room at a haunted house. I was dressed as a mad doctor with a ruined lab coat, bloody doctor's instruments and a made-up face, and she asked if I wanted to play doctor later that night. I couldn't respond because my mouth was filled with the blood capsules I had just slipped between my teeth. She didn't appreciate that. I would later break up with that girl. ^*)

This past weekend, I was shopping for liquid latex and other make-up for my Halloween costume/make-up, and there were a LOT of pre-packaged sexy nurse, sexy nun, sexy stewardess, sexy MENTAL PATIENT (!) costumes.

Really.

The actual make-up supply aisles have become smaller and smaller over the years, and while I was looking at the tubes of cream make-up, I overheard a teenage girl talking to her mom about the vampire fangs she was going to buy. I started thinking to myself that HERE'S someone that might actually "get it," but then I saw over her shoulder the cardboard standee of some damn character from the movie Twilight.

While Twilight may have brought vampires into more of a mainstream light, I can't say I'm a fan of the pseudo-goth colors and designs it's brought to the Halloween decorations available this year. And besides, how scary is a sparkling vampire that plays baseball?

Okay, so embracing the monster isn't for everyone, but I don't want to have to embrace the sexy nurse. (Okay, take THAT sentence out of context!) It's sticky. It's hard. It's time-consuming to make yourself up. As I get older, I find myself getting tired earlier and earlier during the day on Halloween because I can't seem to operate on less than six hours of sleep any more, and getting up at 5:00am because I need time for my liquid latex to dry before I apply any make-up or stage blood can drain a guy. But damn if it isn't worth it.

I could throw on a sports jersey, wear a hardhat and overalls, sport a cowboy hat or slip into a black t-shirt with a skull on the front and say, "There. I'm in costume." But what's the point? I could technically do any of these things any time of the year. But to dress up as . . . well, I'm not going to say what I'm doing this year yet as I want to keep it a surprise. I can't pass up that opportunity to play with the make-up and allow myself to be something completely different yet somehow intrisically part of who I really am.

Dress up as whatever you want for Halloween, but do me a favor, will ya'? Just one time howl at the moon. Scream. Yell, "Boo!" at someone. Get into the spirit just for a brief moment, then go back to doing whatever it is you're doing. I won't hold it against you if you just dust off your 501st Legion Stormtrooper armor, but maybe for a second, you could walk like a zombie in honor of Joe Schreiber's Death Troopers novel?

^*On the other hand, the woman I would meet later in life and would become my wife, "gets" me. The year I dressed up as Jason Voorhees? We made her a Camp Crystal Lake counselor t-shirt. It was her idea to use partially cooked rice died in yellow food coloring to pass as maggots for a zombie get-up one year. She may not dress up as a monster, but she "got it" nonetheless. )