Your complete guide to dressing up for Halloween

Image by peasap via Flickr

Which costume to wear on Halloween is one of the most important holiday choices you make all year, perhaps second only to deciding whether you should observe Easter or Passover.

A poor choice can result in ridicule or even incarceration, should you, for instance, dress as a suicide bomber and go trick-or-treating near a military base.

Unfortunately, you should have started planning yesterday at latest, but it’s still not too late to come up with a pretty good costume, though let’s face it, a great one is now out of the question.

An effective way to approach the issue is to first ask yourself: Do I want to do Halloween Classic and dress as a skeleton, ghost or devil? Or should I dare to do something genuinely scary and go as Dick Cheney?

Remember that it is important to be imaginative but not so imaginative as to look like a complete idiot. Also, avoid any costume that will cause people to ask the embarrassing question, “What the hell are you supposed to be?”

For that reason, nineteenth-century French poets such as Rimbaud or Verlaine, for example, should be ruled out immediately.

Most vegetables can also be eliminated from consideration. Though vegetables are healthy and nutritious, a five-foot-ten walking broccoli rabe seldom comes across as attractive.

Vampires and zombies are pop-culture icons this year so you should be aware that dressing as one will win you no points for originality. However, in the event that you really are a vampire or zombie, people may cut you some slack.

Authenticity is often the key to a successful masquerade. Anyone can buy a cheap, clichéd, skeleton costume at a bargain store in a run-down neighborhood. But the celebrant who takes the trouble to go to a cemetery, dig up a decayed corpse, extract its rotting bones and attach them to a black satin body suit with some sort of noisome, slimy adhesive will win plaudits from his fellow revelers.

Similarly, a werewolf costume may be enhanced if the wearer randomly approaches other guests at the Halloween parties he attends and tears out their jugular veins with his canine and incisor teeth, causing great gouts of blood and gore to spew all over the room. This can only add to the general merriment.

Some people disdain dressing up for Halloween because they think it’s just for children or because they feel that over-commercialization has drained the holiday of its true significance. These are the perfect people to startle with your Halloween high jinks.

Even though they jump several feet in the air, scream in a thin, piercing falsetto and lose sphincter control, later on they will appreciate your timely reminder of what Halloween is really all about. For it is an evocation of primordial terror, that elemental, nightmarish dread that makes the blood run cold, the skin go clammy with fear and the heart seize up as if it were suddenly crushed in the jaws of a steel vise.