Today is Halloween, which means you are no doubt getting ready for a party or filling your bowl with candy for the trick-or-treaters or, if you are the parent of a teenager, like me, cleaning your house before his/her friends arrive to mess it up again.
Though I don’t know your plans, there is one thing I am sure of. Tonight you will see numerous costumes inspired by the works of writers and artists. As you know, in this blog I love to celebrate the various ways that artists and creatives make our lives better, and truly, what would Halloween be without their influence?
Without writers and artists, many of our most popular and long-lasting costumes would not exist.
Thanks to comic book writers, we have Spiderman and Supergirl, Batman and Captain America.
Television creators gave us Mr. Spock and Doctor Who, Big Bird and The Cone Heads.
Children’s book authors provided Waldo and The Cat in the Hat, Hermione Granger and Peter Pan.
Thanks to movie creators, we have Princess Leia and Indiana Jones, Minnie Mouse and Beetlejuice.
But it’s the literary writers who have delivered our most enduring costumes, Frankenstein and Dracula, Sherlock Holmes and The Phantom of the Opera, and so many more.
Sometimes artists themselves are even celebrated in costume. Think Vincent Van Gogh and William Shakespeare, Lady Gaga and the band members from Kiss.
And costumes alone are not the only way artists have added to our enjoyment. What about all those horror movies we watch over and over, the Charlie Brown Great Pumpkin cartoon we still adore, the scary stories, like “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” that we read to our children, the songs like, “The Monster Mash” or “Thriller” that we play over and over, not to mention dancing to “The Time Warp.”
Just try to imagine a Halloween without any of these beloved traditions. Now apply that thinking to your other favorite holidays and you’ll quickly see, we artists just make life more fun.
