Christmas is depressing, Thanksgiving is exhausting, Valentine's Day is like a love letter from your heart telling you to live under a bridge. The only good holiday is Halloween.
So naturally, you are having a Halloween party, because Halloween parties combine all the good things about parties: alcohol, spooky snacks, cobwebs, plastic spiders, the inescapable inevitability of your own gruesome and regrettable death, and people who don't totally look like themselves so you can reasonably pretend that you weren't avoiding someone because "I just didn't recognize you in that hat."
The bad news, though, is that your life is likely filled with ding-dongs who think Halloween is a good time to wear racist costumes. Like this.
Or this.
Or this.
All of this is bad and there are a lot of them! You do not want this person in your house. But what can you do if your white friend Brenda (it's always fucking Brenda) shows up in a headdress and, for some reason, a bindi, and you don't know what to do?
Here, organized by types of racism for your convenience, is what to do.
Your Friend Is in Blackface
1. Good news! Your friend just displayed the best reason to not be friends with them anymore. Consider what other options you have in terms of friends: Is there a beloved houseplant you think you can bond over reruns of Teen Mom with? Make friends with that plant. Talk to that plant. Fall in love. Build a family of plants.
2. Before you make any decisions, determine from your terrible friend what it is that they think they are. Maybe, for some reason, you have confused their innocous, but bad, costume for something racist. Is it blackface or just a poorly executed Delicious Man Who Has Fallen in a Vat of Chocolate?
3. Is your friend repentant? If so, suggest your friend come around back to be hosed down with cold water; once their skin has regained its natural colour, allow them back into your apartment.
4. Tell your friend not to pull that fucking bullshit again.
5. Make love to your wife, a plant.
Your Friend Is In A Bindi
1. Maybe your friend comes to your door wearing a bindi, knowing full-well it is a bindi and refusing to accept that it's offensive. "Gwen Stefani wears bindis all the time," Fucking Brenda says. "Why can't I wear it?" Rub your temples methodically trying to find the correct words while Fucking Brenda says some bullshit about chakras but pronounces it "SHARK-AHS."
2. Explain to Brenda that unless she is willing to convert to Hinduism and be able to adequately explain how the bindi can symbolize the entire goddamn universe to South Asian women around the world, she is not allowed to wear a bindi.
3. When she argues with you, tell her that going to yoga once a week does not mean she is an Honourary Brown.
4. Tell Brenda she can enter your home if she removes the bindi entirely and sticks it to a mirror, the way all our mothers did, in order to wear it again and again until the stickiness was lost, causing it to one day fall into a cup of chai.
5. If she calls it chai tea, call the cops because you are going to kill her right here and now.
Your Friend Is Dressed as a Geisha
1. Wonder openly why you know so many people who behave like this.
2. Clearly you made some mistakes, at some point in your life, if there are people in your life who think any of this is acceptable.
3. Who is this, anyway? Did you meet in school, maybe? On Facebook? Why are you friends with them? What are you trying to prove?
4. Have you called your mother? Sometimes she can tether you to reality. When was the last time you called your mother?
5. I miss her too.
Your Friend Is Wearing Something Called "Tribal Temptation"
1. I mean, is it even worth it.
2. What are we really fighting for here? Why are we trying to teach anyone anything?
3. I mean, generally, like in life. What are we here for, you know?
4. Tell your friend that actually this is not a Halloween party and this is a funeral for you, because you cannot live with them anywhere near you.
5. Take to your bedroom, alone, while the non-racists in your home continue to have a good time. Pour yourself a Scotch — the good one you hid, for special occasions. Take a deep sip. Consider the world's darkness. Fix your cat-eye makeup. (Lotion helps get rid of mistakes!)
A Group of Friends Are Dressed as "Ratchet"
1. Gather bricks and the remaining Scotch in a bag. Slip out of your apartment and walk down to the river.
2. Tie the bricks to your feet. Remember a better time in the world when people dressed up as doctors or zombies or ghosts or Peppermint Patties for Halloween.
3. Wonder how it all went so wrong. Didn't you try? Weren't you a good person? Didn't you do your best?
4. People seemed to like the cheeseballs, though. People love cheeseballs.
5. Walk into the river. Beg for God's forgiveness.