Staying Safe on Halloween

It's almost Halloween! Just a few more days. While you're putting the final touches on your kids' costumes (or your own), carving pumpkins, decorating your front yard, and making sure you have enough candy, it's also important to make sure you know how to keep yourself and/or your kids safe. Trick-or-Treating is a lot of fun, but a lot of things can happen while walking outside at night. Here are some helpful tips on how to stay safe this Halloween.

1. Use glow sticks. This is especially important if your costume is dark, which can make it difficult for drivers to see you at night. Glow sticks are cheap and can be found in dollar stores and in the Halloween section of most other stores.

2. Don't enter a stranger's house. This should be a no-brainer, but I figured I should mention it anyway. If anyone invites you or your child into their house to receive candy, and you don't know them, do NOT go in.

3. Don't let children trick-or-treat unsupervised. Kids should not be walking around alone at night anytime of year, but on Halloween it is especially important. You never know what kind of weirdos are walking around watching these kids.

4. Don't accept unpackaged candy from strangers. If you're at the house of someone you don't know, and they give you an uunsealed/unpackaged/homemade treat, don't eat it. I hate to sound paranoid, but you really never know what people put in these treats. There are a lot of sick people out there.

If you have any other Halloween safety tips, leave a comment!

Costumes and Cultural Appropriation

It's that time of year again. Time for haunted houses, scary movies, pumpkin everything, and...censoring costumes?
Over the last few years, people have been complaining about people wearing costumes that they consider to be cultural appropriation (i.e. dressing like a Native American). Colleges even create guidelines for costumes their students can and cannot wear by determining what is and is not offensive. What they fail to understand is that not everyone is offended by the same things.
Let's break this down a little bit. True, the definition of cultural appropriation is "the act of taking or using things from a culture that is not your own, especially without showing that you understand or respect this culture" (source). However, if you really think about it, going by that definition, almost everything we do, wear, and eat could be considered cultural appropriation. The Huffington Post has a neat little article that lists some of these things.
When it comes to Halloween costumes, Allie Beth Stuckey, aka The Conservative Millenial, has a great little flow chart for how to decide what costumes you should and should not wear

While some people may consider people who wear these culturally appropriating costumes to be jerks, the fact is, they have a right to be jerks. However, those of you who are offended by such costumes, also have the right to not associate with people you think are jerks. If they're going to wear a costume you find offensive, don't invite them to your party. It's that simple.
Before I sign off, while we're on this subject, if you get upset when people dress as Native Americans and such, but not when they dress as "slutty priests/nuns/Catholic school girls," you are a hypocrite. I've never understood why it seems to be totally okay to mock Christians, but if any other group is even slightly offended, everyone goes bananas.
If you have any thoughts on this subject, leave a comment. (But please be civil, thanks!)