Halloween is my wife’s favorite holiday, besides Christmas and her birthday and hour anniversary and date nights and Independence Day and New Year’s. (She loves holidays.) No one escapes her wrath, i.e., wearing a costume. Not even our young son.

Last year we forced him into a lion outfit. He wasn’t even two months old and about the only things he could do were cry and shit, yet it was 100% clear to everyone involved that wearing a lion costume was NOT something he was enthusiastic about.

It doesn’t matter, though. We’re more than used to hearing him cry. Besides, on Halloween the constant screaming just blends right in! So Mom and Buried is at it again.

It can be tough to find a suitable costume for such a young kid. There are only really two categories: things that look cute and things adults think are funny. Sometimes those two things coincide (e.g., Yoda) and sometimes they don’t (though our kid is so really really really ridiculously good-looking, we could dress him as Ben Stiller’s nose and he’d still be cute).

When they don’t coincide you have to choose. In my family, I’m much more likely to side with the “stuff I think is funny” category, but my wife runs Halloween. And she prefers cute. Which basically means animal costume.

We’ve learned from other parents, next year he’ll be two and will supposedly have some opinions of his own. Which means that this Halloween is just about the last time we get to choose what he wears. Once he gets to choose, cute and furry animals will likely lose out to nonsense like “Yo Gabba Gabba” characters and conceptual outfits that evoke hot button political issues, like the classic anti-abortion (or is it pro?) costume at the top of this post.

It also works out, since I am big on humiliating your kids at an early age, in order to stockpile some ammo for when they start acting out as teens. Because although my wife doesn’t see forcing my son into an adorable monkey costume for Halloween as humiliation (she thinks it’s the cutest thing ever), he definitely ain’t gonna be happy when he’s 12 and we post the pictures on facetube+, or whatever the social network du jour is in 2022. So it’s a win-win: she gets her cute, I get my mortifying.

Fortunately for my son, by the time he’s 12 he’ll have more humiliating experiences to worry about than having once worn a monkey costume. Especially after he discovers his penis.

But until that day comes arrives, we’ve got this:

Anyone else out there forcing their children to dress up for their own enjoyment? Let me know in the comments!