Julie Jay: Darling Husband dives into the pumpkin TikTok style with a hand mixer 

It is that time of year again when Ted’s costume must be sorted, and the stakes are high because Ted’s cousins are total pros when it comes to the dressing-up side of things.

Julie Jay

COMEDIAN

"Is Ted old enough for trick or treating?” asks Darling Husband, his eyes wide with excitement.

“I think we might be a year off yet,” I answer, and DH is visibly disappointed.

"Do you think we will get any trick-or-treaters this year?" he asks forlornly, but he and I both know the odds of any children making the hike uphill to our mountainside abode are minimal.

I have often wondered how country children did it back when we were kids — were they ferried to urban areas?

Did they have to trek through the fields for some monkey nuts? Did they, like the Famous Five, repeatedly trespass on neighbouring farmers’ property only to be rewarded with slabs of cherry cake?

Ted is only two, but somehow this is his third Halloween, which is something my pass maths brain just can’t get my head around. It is that time of year again when Ted’s costume must be sorted, and the stakes are high because Ted’s cousins are total pros when it comes to the dressing-up side of things.

On a hot summer’s day, any one of them might be channelling their inner batman, donning a Jedi costume, or on one particularly memorable occasion, dressed up as Micheál Martin.

On his first Halloween, I dressed him up as a tiger. This was when we were all so consumed by the TV show Tiger King that Ted did well not to be christened Joe Exotic. My phone only recently reminded me of Tiger Ted in all his six-week glory. When confronted by this memory, DH and I discussed how the entire country officially lost the plot during lockdown to such an extent a relatively sane friend retweeted a link to a Change.Org campaign to get the infamous zoo keeper released.

Given that the Netflix star threatened to kill a woman on multiple occasions and the same friend had been very active in Amnesty International in college, it is safe to say we can all just put the whole affair down to the fact we had, collectively, temporarily lost our minds.

We went for a generic bat theme for Ted’s spooky costume last year. Sadly the wings kept falling off (occupational hazard, so I’m told), and Ted was not feeling it. Every time the velcro failed his brow furrowed the same way my accountant’s brow furrows when I try to include my Netflix as a tax write-off.

I hadn’t thought about it before, but a bat without the man part is a fairly innocuous costume — before any bat lovers slide into my DMs, please let me court your favour by sharing an interesting bat fact.

The Aztecs’ Mictlāntēcuhtli, their God of the Dead, had a scrunched, bat-like face and clawed hands and feet, which is utterly terrifying and is yet another reason why bats and bat outfits must be avoided at all costs.

This year we are going all out: Ted is dressing up as a dinosaur, complete with a tail and dinosaur feet. We have been practising our roars by sneaking up on Daddy, who plays along with animated responses to a T-Rex trapped in the body of a West Kerry toddler.

Costume sorted, we now just have to work out how to mark the occasion.

“We could have a Halloween party,” DH suggests. “I’m thinking bobbing for apples and pin the tail on the donkey.’

“Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t realise you grew up in a Dickens novel,” I shoot back, although as 1980s Irish babies, we both know and recognise the joy of dipping the head into a basin of Granny Smiths, which for some reason I referred to as Adams Apples for a long, confusing time.

No doubt I will regale Ted in years to come that this was indeed a Halloween highlight for Daddy and I when we were his age, but it will be hard for Ted to hear me over the whirring sound of Lidl laserbeams and Tesla hoverboards.

DH and I agree that Ted is too young for the traditional Halloween games, so we make do with Oíche Shamhna decorations. The only pumpkin I can find is a teeny, tiny baby pumpkin — it looks like it didn’t have a shot at life and fills me with inexplicable sadness.

DH and I survey the vegetable with the same level of intrigue a pathologist uses to examine a suspicious death. Eventually, DH dives in with a hand mixer to detach its sticky innards because he has watched a TikTok on how this is the best approach.

DH assures me the advice is purely secular. The last time we used an online video to help us in the kitchen, the content creator kept insisting the snack in question was ‘perfect for your church’ and ‘great for Sunday School’, so it was hard to enjoy the cookies wracked with the guilt of knowing we had zero intention of attending Mass anytime soon.

Much like a Quentin Tarantino film, the hand mixer is reasonably effective but the gratuitous violence takes from the overall experience. Between DH manhandling a pumpkin and the southern drawl of the TikToker in the background, I am starting to get Texas Chainsaw Massacre vibes, but the result is so impressive both Ted and I congratulate Daddy on a job well done, and reward him with hugs and kisses and high fives all round.

Ted requests an apple, which I give him and tell him back when I was his age, we had to fight other children for fruit by dipping our heads in a basin of water.

“We couldn’t even use our hands,” adds DH.

Our toddler-dinosaur giggles at DH, mostly because he is dressed up as a WWF fighter complete with mullet and navel neckline.

Ted bites into his apple with the confidence of a dinosaur who has officially taken over Jurassic Park, and is about to ransack mammy’s jeep, and by jeep I mean my mighty Yaris (once a múinteoir, always a múinteoir).