Note: Since Halloween is essentially canceled this year, I figured I’d send out a piece I wrote some time ago (and still like) about our love of crafting for our favorite holiday. I leave it to you as to whether this move counts as a treat or a trick.
My love of mask-making probably began the Halloween my brother wore an Ace Frehley costume. I can’t remember exactly which year it was, but it had to be the very late seventies when his then-favorite band KISS blew up, penetrating even our remote Midwest town with their makeup and catchy jams about rocking banged out on weapon-shaped smoking guitars. The band was essentially a troupe of trick-or-treaters from the beginning, and it’s not surprising that many kids rang their neighbors’ doors on Halloween looking ready to Shout It Out Loud.
It’s also not surprising why my brother chose to dress up as the band member he did. Paul Stanley, with his aggressively revealed and hairy chest, would have been a bold choice for a middle-schooler in that time and place. As far as I can tell, nobody really knew (or knows) how to be Gene Simmons other than Gene Simmons. Cat-faced drummer Peter Criss was, well, the drummer, anchored in back, almost never speaking, musically important but not a huge part of the spectacle. But lead guitarist “Space Ace” Frehley had a galactic theme to his getup, and he could actually shred, which made him a prime target of Midwestern Boy emulation.
My brother’s Ace Frehley was, not to oversell it or anything, simply awesome. Our parents glittered huge swoops of paper to make a sparkly triangle for his shoulders and exaggerated cuffs for his wrists. They used foil to convert his off-brand moon boots into platform shoes truly worthy of moons. And, of course, they painted his face just like Ace, white with silver star-things exploding around each eye. I’m sure that he had some sort of guitar, too, probably cardboard with strummable butcher-twine strings, and I want to say that he had a wig hiding his short blond hair under metal-length black. I don’t remember the actual trick-or-treating or party going while he was Ace; I only remember the making and what he became.
My wife and I love making costumes, too. The first Halloween with M and Q, our son and daughter, we dressed them up as a firefighter and a Dalmatian. My wife sewed black spots to a white onesie and black socks to an old hat for ears. For M, she turned a plastic soda bottle, clothespin, and some red paint into a remarkably realistic fire extinguisher. There was the robot year, with M’s suit built out of boxes and brass brads, with a circuit board of curled wires and lights that really flashed. Or the time M wanted to be a green plastic army man, and we coated one of my wife’s old jackets in four cans of spray paint until it shone and cracked when he moved. To make Q a convincing fortune teller, my wife sewed a flowing dress and a headscarf and glued two glass paperweights together to form a crystal ball in which I swore we could glimpse a future. We've even done the family costume thing, too, going as a respectable Addams family. (People still talk about Q’s startling embodiment of Wednesday.)
I’m not exactly sure why we put ourselves through the struggle of making each year for just a few hours of pretend. Perhaps we have too many reasons — taking advantage of the brief time when our kids want costumes, dissatisfaction with store costumes, the candy haul, or just the rare opportunity to make ourselves into makers of things.
Why we like to wear masks is a deeper question, of course. I’ve never been persuaded by the usual claim that we use masks to hide our true selves. Kids, after all, love to dress up, and they are only beginning to have something of the required sort to hide. If anything, as we’ve seen this year with M and Q, the desire to dress up fades as self-consciousness takes hold. Still, kids understand that masks give us a way to become something else altogether. Some nights dressing as a ‘70s rock star is enough to be a ‘70s rock star.
Halloween and its old story complicates things, though. Like many of our traditions, this one seems to have been tied to the harvest and handed down (or up) from pagans — the Celts or maybe the Welsh or the Scots or the Druids scaring everyone from the woods — then co-opted by Catholics and vilified, inevitably, by Protestants. People supposedly believed that ghosts and ghouls appeared on the last night of the Celtic year to visit their former homes, and the living had to scare or fool them back under until the saints arrived. Funny, then, that we dress up our children and lead them out into the night to deal with the dead. Then again, perhaps we make Halloween masks for our children (and ourselves) so that we might somehow again bring close those who we can now only touch in memory.
We have lost so many, and we don’t know where they’ve gone.
This post, even if recycled, made my day. I have no kids and haven’t made a mask in years. But in between kindergarten and first grade I was enrolled in a summer program called ‘Monster Camp.’ All of our activities involved role playing monster scenarios - trolls beneath bridges, lazy loch-Nessing, Ogre dodgeball. (Now that I’m writing this I’m worried I’ve imagined the entire event!) In any case, our culminating activity was an elaborate mask making day with subsequent parade. We were encouraged to bring out our ugliness, our ferocity, our hidden ghoul. I still have that mask, folded and filed away someplace forgotten. Or maybe not so forgotten after all. Thanks!