Things we learned this week:
• Fast food giant KFC’s main Twitter account follows just 11 people: the five Spice Girls and six guys named Herb. That’s 11 herbs and spices. Brilliant.
• Quebec passed a law that will force niqab- and burka-wearing women to bare their faces when using public services.
Did the politicians raise their hands to vote, or just wave their tiki torches?
• Langford, which has seen 765 housing starts this year, is about to break ground on an 869-unit condo development at Langford Lake. Meanwhile, Saanich council rejects a 25-unit, four-storey condo project in Cordova Bay because it’s too damn big.
Only here would that not be seen as odd.
• A Winnipeg school is catching heat for banning students from wearing costumes on Halloween. Instead, it will hold “tie and scarf day.”
Oh sure, another public institution knuckles under to the powerful Big Neckware lobby and its machiavellian attempts to throttle our most vulnerable citizens, the children (who are our future, BTW).
For, jeezly weezly, what other reason could there be to deny the little darlings at Winnipeg’s Snowflake Elementary, or whatever it’s called, the chance to dress up on Halloween? Surely, the stated excuse — that some costumes are too scary or too inappropriate — can’t be right.
If that were the real problem, there would be no need for a blanket ban. The school could do what schools have always done when kids cross the clothing line: make them change. (Or not. My sister once booted my nephew out of the car in full Bozo gear, only for him to discover that it was not, in fact, Clown Day. He spent the whole day dressed that way.)
Or perhaps the No Fun Police’s idea of what is socially acceptable has shifted so far toward the safe and unobjectionable that there is no room left for fright night at all. It feels as if it has trended that way since 2011, when two Calgary schools told students to ditch scary/gory costumes in favour of “caring” ones.
Stop me if you have heard this before. I have a tendency to go Cranky Old Guy when Big Mother presumes to protect us from ourselves, refusing to let schoolchildren give each other valentines lest someone be left out and feel hurt (just wait until the first time your heart gets truly broken, junior) or deciding to replace Halloween with Spirit Day or Autumn Festival in the same way they have replaced Christm… er, The Holiday That Must Not Be Named, with Winterlude or the Generic Exchange of Non-denominational GMO-Free Fair Trade Goods.
But holy smokes (and I hope I didn’t just offend anyone by using that vaguely religious reference), when did it become the job of Canada’s schools to make life as dully inoffensive as an airline magazine?
OK, much of this is down to parents, the ones who hover over schools like helicopters at the siege of Khe Sanh. Some object to Halloween on religious grounds (as a pagan festival, it offends Christians; as a Christian festival, it offends those who enjoy being offended on behalf of others). Some object because poorer families can’t afford the expensive get-ups that have become common (you’ll need to get used to economic inequity, too, junior). Some simply don’t want the costumes ruined before trick-or-treating begins.
Schools can argue they need to confine the wearing of costumes to a certain time so that they can get actual book-learnin’ accomplished during the rest of the day. Also, they can argue it’s just wrong to terrify a kindergarten student (or teacher) by dressing like the creepy clown from It (or the one from the White House, for that matter).
Fine, but it still leaves Halloween on a slippery slope (hence the guard rails, caution signs and insurance waiver). Much trick-or-treating is now done in daylight, and only then with a safety checklist (face paint instead of masks/no flammable clothing/no gum-nuts-seeds-hard candies or other choking hazards) whose length rivals that used before a NASA flight. The sale of fireworks, which used to make Halloween sound like the aforementioned Khe Sanh, hasn’t been legal in any Greater Victoria municipality for a decade. Pumpkins are felt-penned, not carved. Dagnabbity, it used to be that if you didn’t lose at least one of your digits to jack-o’-lantern construction and three to firecrackers, you considered the night a total flop.
Halloween is supposed to be (a little) scary. It’s supposed to be about (slightly) illicit thrills. Nobody ever went to the movies to watch Jamie Lee Curtis in Tie and Scarf Day VII.
