I Got The Spirit But Lose The Feeling

(aka Fuck You Spirit Halloween 2013)

Happy Halloween Season, ladies and gentlemen and all those in between. There’s a lot of swearing in this one.

A month ago, I received a comment on a past article I wrote, which in itself is an odd phenomenon. In a sea full of horror blogs, we’re good but we’re not the most popular. We usually get only spam comments (first world problems) on what we write here.  Making this comment even more odd, it was negative.

You suck and Spirit Halloween is the best Halloween retailer in the whole world. ( a.k.a fuck you Strange Jason)

I imagine whoever wrote that was wearing the Chick Magnet costume or something even more dumb (and there’s plenty more) they got with their Employee Discount when they worked at Spirit Halloween last year.

Spirit Halloween, owned by Spencer’s Gifts, will have over 1,000 stores in operation this Halloween season. There will be more Spirit Halloween stores in the New York City region than there will be hits on this particular blog post. I am a small fish in an ocean, so that my diatribe against the sexist, racist and homophobic costumes that are a staple of Spirit Halloween’s inventory elicits a comment, I have to wonder just what the fuck? Did they hire someone to just search out any negative word-of-mouth about the store? If so, that would be hilarious.

While looking into Spirit Halloween, I found that they operate The Spirit of Children program, a charity that brings Halloween to children’s hospitals by orchestrating Halloween parties; in addition, Spirit Halloween conducts in-store fundraising for these hospitals. As of 2012, since the 2006 start of the program, they’ve raised over 11 million dollars for 130 hospitals across the country. That would be great if they didn’t raise the money by selling racist, stupid, and outright cheap costumes.  It’s like how Breaking Bad starts out – Spirit Halloween sells meth to raise money for orphans (or something.)

Spirit Halloween, for those of you who don’t know, is also the main source for all those ‘sexy’ costumes for women – the sexy cartoon characters, the sexy horror characters, the sexy what the fuck character, the sexy racism. I’m all for people being sexy and dressing how they want, but the continued emphasis that there’s always a ‘sexy’ costume section of Spirit Halloween debases Halloween into not a celebration of costume and fun for a woman – these costumes continue send the message that  ‘Halloween is another night of the year where you are only to be lusted after and sought as a fancier sexy version of a child’s toy.’

Hey – If a woman (or anyone) wants to dress up as a sexy nun or an erotic construction worker, please. Go ahead. There are plenty of places for you to buy these outfits ALL YEAR ROUND and I encourage you to engage that side. But don’t use Halloween as an excuse to walk around outside in lingerie. What I’m getting at is stop using Halloween as an excuse. If you want to do it, do it without having to wait until October 31st. Do it without someone giving you permission to do so. I don’t want to keep this provocative costumes OUT of Halloween, but that anyone – women, men or whoever – should feel that safety to dress however they want all year around. The Sexy Halloween Costumes seems to put these behaviors in a ‘once every year in October’ category which ultimately means surrendering the choice to someone else.

But – there always caveats. Dressing as some other ethnicity as a costume makes you an asshole, no matter who you are – sexy or not. And if you’re the type to dress up as a sexy Leatherface, you’re probably the type of individual who would be more satisfied MAKING the costume yourself then shelling out fifty to sixty bucks for some cheap shit Made In China sold to you by a shitty corporation that looks to fuck up Halloween. Yeah – Spirit is overpriced. If you would pay sixty bucks for a priest-with-a-boner-robe, you’re simply encouraging Spirit’s horrible pricing.

Not to mention the multiple, multiple, multiple, multiple allegations that Spirit Halloween and its parent company, Spencer’s Gifts, engage in intellectual property theft – that means they rip off artists by stealing their ideas, probably by buying their work and ‘reverse engineering’ it. They’ve been caught so many times now, their whole attitude is ‘what are you going to do? we’ve got lawyers. Come at me, bro.” And lord, the bros.

But, overall, Spirit Halloween, in my opinion, perpetuates the bullshit attitude of assholes who think that once a year, it’s perfectly fine to act like a racist asshole or be some drunk sexist idiot in facepaint or to demand the female form be plastered in over-sexified skin-tight wrapping for their amusement. This is a holiday for the creeps and the freaks and Spirit Halloween has tried to pull in the dipshit for the sole purpose of making a buck. I welcome everyone who wants to celebrate Halloween but those, who I have come to know, that really enjoy this holiday don’t shop at Spirit. They either make their own costumes out of cobbled parts or have been working on them for months. They might spend MORE than sixty bucks on their outfit but they did it in parts and labor, not some prefab outfit that is someone else’s idea of a costume.

Maybe it all comes down to the dumb ass costumes. If you want to dress up as a ‘suicide bomber,’ have the balls to do it on the 4th of July. You want to wear a sombrero and a poncho and be some Mexican stereotype? Do it on Thanksgiving.  Do it in the middle of April. Do it not in a house party with all your friends but on the city bus in the morning-after commute. Have some guts and let the world know you’re a piece of shit. Don’t use ‘oh, it’s Halloween’ as some kind of get-out-of-being-called-a-shithead card. If you want to engage in such obnoxious behavior, have the spine to do it year round. I might respect you for finally owning up to being a complete fuck of a person who thinks becoming ‘Big Chief Wood‘ for one night is a good idea. But if you look as Halloween as an excuse, my god–Take your racist, sexist, moronic behavior out of my holiday, you half-ass, amateur hour twit.

So, Alax. In summary: Fuck me? Fuck you, bro. And Fuck Spirit.

Happy Halloween, everybody.