Tanya Sweeney: When did Halloween turn into a fortnight of events? The pressure on parents is enormous

Maybe it is time to reclaim Halloween and all the other holidays and go back to basics

Why are we parents happy to buy into this Halloween industrial complex? Photo: Picture posed/Getty

Halloween proper hasn’t even happened yet, but like Celine Dion during her Vegas residency, we have already endured four fancy outfit changes. I’m using the royal ‘we’, of course, because the only person getting dressed up is the six-year-old.

The first costume was for school, right before the mid-term break, and required me cosplaying as a make-up artist at 7am in order to create a ‘day of the dead’ look using a YouTube tutorial. The second outfit change, for which we were ‘invited’ to dress up for an

See Full Page