Disneyland & Halloween Costumes

I went to Disneyland for the Mickey’s Halloween Party, that takes place in the afternoon, and I was seriously surprised and impressed. 

My wife loves Disneyland and therefore I go along for the ride because it makes her happy. I do have to admit that my love for their funnel cakes may play a small part. 

I want to say that I am happy at how much our society has progressed. We can argue that it has been slow and that its not enough but we should enjoy those small changes/victories. 

It’s amazing to see how many people wear costumes, how creative they get and how much they are willing to spend. What I love most is that young or old everyone loves Disneyland. Groups of teenagers, adults, grandparents with grandkids, families many dressed up. But what truly caught my attention was how many parents were willing to let their children pick gender opposite costumes. I mostly saw it with little girls but it was amazing and heart warming. 

Growing up my mom never let me wear anything a boy might have worn but she did let me play boy oriented sports, go figure. I wanted to be a power ranger, she gave me the pink one, I wanted red or green but I knew my role and I willingly wore the pink one. For some reason I thought it was better than the yellow one. Now in no way am I trying to constantly go against my mother, but since then I mainly just wear male specific costumes. Although this may be attributed to my wife and I getting matching outfits but even then I love the guy ones. I remember when I was in High school I bought my first pair of guy jeans and she made me go return them even though I had used my money from my job to buy them.  The only thing she was semi-lenient on was my sweatshirts and that was because those are basically unisex. 

Anyway, I thought it was very progressive of those parents to give their daughters the choice. Some of the costumes I saw were: Thor, Batman, Spiderman, Captain America, Woody, Buzz Lightyear, mainly superhero costumes. Now many will argue that there aren’t enough female superheroes. And, yes maybe but the important part is that they went out and let their daughters choose their costumes, and after they chose the parents supported their decision and bought it for them. 

Disney of course supplied the best of their costumes during their main street parade. 

It was a priceless moment for me and my wife. I think its important for us to not only teach the next generations the importance of acceptance but also of being less gender specific or gender biased. It doesn’t matter what your gender is, what’s important is respect and equality for all. All the labels in the world won’t matter as soon as we can stop being preoccupied with our external appearance and worry about the internal frame of thought.