Each holiday comes with it’s own brand of unpleasantness and
disappointment. New Year’s Eve offers forced joviality along with the
prospect of being French kissed by a blowzy stranger with Cold Duck on
her breath. Christmas means spending lots of thought and money on
presents for people who already have way too much stuff and enduring
long hours with folks you’d never spend five minutes with if you didn’t
share a smidge of DNA.
However, most holidays also have an
upside. Thanksgiving often brings out the charitable side of people
who donate to food drives and volunteer too serve dinner to those in
need. Easter signals the final days of winter and sometimes the final
round of the Masters.
Then, there’s Halloween, the holiday, with no redeeming features. For starters, it’s not even a proper “holiday” because nobody gets to miss school or work.
My husband and I are not fans of Halloween. I hate dressing up - clearly I lack a sense of whimsy and the need to pretend to be something I am not. Or maybe I'm just content with who I am. You can be the judge. His birthday is three days before and his childhood parties were always black and orange-themed and required a costume. You'd think all the free candy would balance the drag of dressing up, but as the years went by his hatred only grew. Since we don’t have children avoiding this holiday is pretty simple…just turn the lights off and stay away from the front door.
As the trick or treaters approach my door with their parents in tow, I often wonder who exactly is wearing the costume... 
Boo!
There’s nothing like Halloween in New York City. New York is home to some of the most artistic and creative people on the planet, most of whom will jump at any opportunity to put on a show. Consider the city’s eight hundred thousand drag queens, who, just to take a trip out to the deli, will put on seven-inch platforms, a sequined butterfly shawl and a two-foot wig. In the weeks before Halloween, the whole city began to fill with a fizzy, randy excitement. Shop windows were crammed with bondage gear, feather boas, broquaded undies and outrageous wigs, and the window boxes of the West Village overflowed with chrysanthemums and pumpkins and squash—all in their final bursts of color before the decay of the winter set in. And all those flamboyant colors; all those sequins, feathers and rubber masks started to bring out everyone’s inner drag queen. And it was no different for the dog people. There are more that thirty dog runs in the city, and therefore more than thirty annual doggie costume parades.