Lost in Translation?

Français, SVP

Every year, Molly and Betsy come up with costume ideas, and Cricket negotiates until she thinks they've agreed on a workable concept, then she goes to town. We're lucky that we live in a place where costumes can easily be worn 3 times Halloween week before they get relegated to the costume box to be used, abused, re-purposed and re-invented, so not only does Cricket get to thoroughly enjoy the creative process, but the girls actually get a lot of wear out of their costumes. This year, though, we skipped the downtown Halloween Parade. Damp, sideways pellets of snow just doesn't make for a fun night, even in disguise.

Often, the reasons behind the choices are at least as interesting as the final products themselves. When Betsy was small enough to be malleable, Molly really liked having related costumes -- fire fighter plus dalmation-in-a-truck, monkey plus banana, the Paper Bag Princess and dragon -- but that soon ended. When Betsy was four, she was determined to be a water strider, until Cricket explained that no matter what the costume looked like, she would not be able to walk on water when she wore it. She decided a dragonfly would suit her just fine.

Usually the fountain of costume concepts flows richly right up until about the second week in October, when Cricket insists on a Final Decision. This year, though, maybe because we had not had a real Halloween in France, Molly announced what she wanted to be back in August, and she remained faithful to the concept. She wanted to be a snail in a car, after the old joke about the escargot (a small snail with a need for speed gets himself a tricked out custom car, with an S painted on the side. Whenever he cruises down the street, everyone in town turns and says... "Look at that S-car go!).

Challenging, but doable. Until Betsy decided she wanted to be a joke, too. She proposed any number of jokes, all of which would have had to be explained in detail at each house. She's 6, and six year olds know that jokes cannot be rushed. Many proposals from both sides later, an agreement was reached and signed by opposing counsel: Betsy would be a small owl. With a sign.

In French, a small owl is a chouette, but if something is chouette, slangily, it's cool. Vache means cow, and, inexplicably, vachement means awesomely, or really. So, Betsy was a small owl, but she was also Cool. Really Cool. And made cooler (or funnier) by the fact that there is a 4-foot tall owl with a head the size of a bed pillow declaring that she's cool in the same cadence as Bond. James Bond. So, we amused ourselves greatly, and sent a plain-old little owl out into the American Trick-or-Treating world.