Mother Ireland

I suppose I could describe Halloween in the O’Neill house as a mixed bag of lethal sugar rush inducing pound shop sweets and those dark chocolates which taste nice but bring on a migraine later.
We spent so long perfecting our costumes that we forgot to buy trick or treat sweets for the kids in the street. We spent an hour hiding behind the sofa when the doorbell went while the husband was despatched on a sweet mercy mission.
We spent the rest of the evening apologising to little kids while handing out cheap, nasty pound shop confectionary that they’d probably be regurgitating on their living room floors later on.
Because we have a dog, opening the front door in our house has to be a carefully synchronised affair. There’s no careless throwing open of the front door and greeting the morning with open arms and a song in our house. You want to open the door, you got to make sure someone’s guarding the kitchen door because there’s a large slobbering beast just waiting to pounce, flatten and gallop without grace off into the horizon. But enough about the husband, I worry the dog could escape too.
So on Halloween night there was a family at the door, two pirate parents and three kids dressed as confused fairies – one was a zombie fairy, one was a pirate fairy and the other was a standard issue run-of-the-mill typical everyday fairy.
So I opened the door and made a fuss over their costumes, and while they were pretending to be impressed by my cheap sweets I heard the familiar sound of claws slipping on the wooden floor, trying to gain momentum. Then there was much screaming and much running as the dog took me off my feet and galloped out into the night after the pirate fairy family.
He’s a big friendly Labrador, he wouldn’t hurt a fly – but he has a beard phobia and chased down said pirates to voice his objection to their fake facial hair. Then his attentions were drawn to three Santas heading off to a house party. When the husband – dressed as a zombie Rastafarian – caught up with him in the car he had Jesus pinned to a wall at the bottom of our street.
As we headed off to see the fireworks Caolan, dressed as a really scary vampire, had consumed a few too many of the lethal pound shop sweets and had a mini-meltdown. As he stood howling in the street, the husband and I found the sight of him screaming open mouthed, vampire teeth in place, full make up and costume quite hilarious. Us laughing made him worse, which made us worse. We missed the first half of the fireworks and the child’s makeup was ruined. Disaster.
We dressed the baby up as a demon. He had his face painted red along with his hair. The face paint said it was safe for young kids, non-toxic and will wash off easily with soapy water. Yeah maybe water with paint stripper mixed in it, applied by a sand blaster. Baby bath is no match for this stuff. A week later the child is still raspberry coloured.