Last night was the annual Halloween party, which went off without a hitch. I can’t tell if Halloween has always been a big thing in Montreal (though it seems like the kind of thing that would be a big deal here) or if it’s recently become bigger as a result of the overall commercialization of the holiday.
Regardless, Halloween has always been one of my favorite holidays, and ever since a party during graduate school at Feral Mom’s (before she was Feral), I have understood the virtues of a good Halloween party. Last night, I am pleased to say that while we did have some grad students not in costume (we say that costumes are encouraged but not required), all the faculty in attendance were in costume.
Though much more effort was expended on many wonderful costumes, the winner for “Most Disturbing” would have to be the latex horse head. It was perfectly proportioned to its wearer’s body so he really looked like a human being with a horse’s head. We learned that he took his son trick-or-treating with it one and actually frightened other kids in the process. He felt kind of bad about it, but not enough not to enjoy telling the story. The fact that he could actually consume a beverage through the horse’s mouth is all the more upsetting.
Perhaps Halloween is even something of a Canadian phenomenon. In Vancouver & along the West Coast there are darker & more occult celebrations of the Day of the Dead (the Parade of Lost Souls by the Public Dreams Society in the “People’s Republic of East Van” is something to behold — entire streets are done up & the costumes *are* the dead, ending with a tribal gathering of some few thousand people in open air with drums & shadows …). MTL seems to follow along, though I hear few firecrackers here. I guess smuggling across bricks of M15s has become somewhat more difficult over the past decade. Where I come from, we used to have firecracker wars on the streets (shoulder mounted tubes carrying bottle rockets, home crafted M60 dynamite, etc). It’s the dark side to the CDN Ucs… _t
I’m sure you threw one hell of a Halloween party – if one can judge based on your completely rocking masquerade wedding party.
The horse head looks very much “Photoshopped”, I am jealous!
It did in real life, too, which only made it more upsetting.
Life imitates Internet!