Colm O'Regan: My kids are dressing up as a ghost and Minnie-Mouse vampire. We can’t be trendsetters every year

Colm O'Regan. Picture: Moya Nolan

It may be too late for this advice. Your child may have picked out their costume by now. It’ll be a ghost or vampire or pirate or something recognisable. Maybe it’ll be from a TV show that they really shouldn’t be watching and now the secret’s out. Your five-year-old arrives at neighbours’ doors dressed as Tommy Shelby from Peaky Blinders telling a surprised Noreen Twomey “This is the day we become respectable, but first we do the dirty work.”

Although it’s still probably better than pirates. I don’t know who they have doing their PR, actually I do it’s Johnny Depp. But pirates have got a relatively easy time reputation-wise. Given they threw people overboard or enslaved them, they’ve still got away with just being labelled as nothing more than rambunctious swashbucklers. No one would dress up as a slaver or overseer unless they are currently running for office in the American Republican party.

At least werewolves have an excuse. They were possessed by an entire moon. And with the focus on rewilding maybe this could be a good year for wolves, were and otherwise.

Vampires have great stickability too. They never go out of fashion. There are a lot of very benign vampire books and tv shows for children that hint that ‘Daddy likes a red drink’ but no one goes into logistics. Vampirina and Isadora Moon don’t mention blood-rages as plot devices.

But I do think there’s so much scope for hipster small children to embrace other monsters before they are snapped up by the mainstream. There are a whole host — literally — of Irish mythological creatures that don’t get a look-in. Forget the vampires. Why not send your child out as the Abhartach, an Irish bad spirit. Or Balor of the evil eye. There is not enough emphasis on the Evil Eye in modern discourse in my opinion. Banshees have gone too commercial but Fomorian Sea Devils are always a reliable shout. A bit of overenthusiastic botox and lip filler and you’ll get that undersea look down pat.

Or go further afield. There is nothing like a book for children to give you a good introduction to any topic. The most thumbed book in our house is Mythical Monsters. A simple run-down of all the monsters you need to know from around the world.

I’ve been leafing through it to pick out something suitably obscure. Perhaps the Chupacabra, a blood-sucking, foul-smelling many-spined (you can never have enough spines) man-sized, bat-like South American fiend whose name means goat-sucker? Or the basilisk, a half-reptile, half-bird hatched from a freak egg laid by a cockerel that was incubated by a toad. “It takes a village” I suppose. Before it goes on to take a village with its razorlike claws.

Could it be the year of Manticore? It’s name sounds like a rebranded petrochemical firm but it’s actually a lion with a man’s face and the tail of a scorpion from which it fires needles.

At short notice I don’t think we can rustle up the necessary papier mache skills for a kraken, or a Scylla, the multi-headed serpent with shark-tooth jaws and a belt of dogs. Yes that’s a belt made of dogs’ heads and the heads are snarling. This is the kind of accessory they should be selling young lads in River Island and Jack Jones.

And our children? In the end, do they have the courage of my convictions? Will they be going out the door as Oni, the three-eyed Japanese former Shinto god who lost his job when Buddhism arrived and who brings sinners to hell in a fiery chariot?

Of course not. They are going out the door as a ghost and Minnie-Mouse vampire. We can’t be trendsetters every year.