Trick or treat: It’s becoming increasingly impossible to come up with a costume idea that won’t offend somebody. Stock picture

It's October. Halloween is upon us and you know what that means: accusations of "cultural appropriation", "insensitivity" and "too spooky" flying through the air faster than a witch on an e-scooter. Once upon a time, you could dress up as whatever you wanted but the rules have changed, and the rules are becoming more and more restrictive every year.

October 31 used to be the one night of the year when we didn't need to worry if our costume was woke enough and about how it might be offensive for minorities, vampires or Disney princesses. There was no misogyny to get pretend mad about, no racist elements to posture about.

But then someone mentioned that us women were dressing way too sexily for the night and renamed the festival Slutoween. The next year someone else pointed out that cultural appropriation was even worse than dressing in a skimpy dress. This year everyone is freaking out that the whole thing has become way too terrifying for children and should probably be banned altogether.

You may want to think twice before selecting your Halloween costume this year thanks to the overly sensitive types who will be monitoring your parties and social media posts to catch someone who commits the ultimate transgression of going out and getting drunk in a tasteless costume.

Take a chance on a misplaced Indian bindi and your boss will be overwhelmed with demands to have you fired, and there'll be endless tweets about how you must be punished for your crimes against fashion and ethnic minorities.

Remember those two girls who dressed up as the Twin Towers and ended up going viral and getting death threats? Yeah, a very tasteless thing to dress up as, but hardly worthy of that kind of response either.

It isn't safe to say anything sensible about it either. A few years ago Nicholas Christakis, a professor at Yale University, was physically mobbed on campus after his wife, also a Yale professor at the time, defended students' right to choose their own costumes without advice from the institution. Since then, in the name of being racially sensitive, loads of US universities have created costume guidelines detailing what is and isn't OK for students to wear at Halloween.

This year legions of politically correct snowflakes have already risen like zombies, determined to squeeze every last drop of fun from the ancient Irish tradition. In some classrooms across the country, the interpretation of what is too scary - or offensive, gross or saddening - means it's virtually impossible to come up with a costume idea that won't offend somebody somewhere or risk permanent damage to a child's mental health.

So, forget your mother cutting holes in an old white sheet or wrapping yourself in a black bin bag. That is way too '80s, not to mention insensitive towards all our sister witches burned for their way of life. It's also too spooky for school.

Little girls are probably allowed to dress up as Elsa from 'Frozen', but not Moana - that's cultural appropriation.

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But before you reach for the Elsa costume, are you sure it's a safe choice for 2019? Isn't it a bit too "white" and heteronormative? Are you just reinforcing notions of white privilege?

To be safe, your child might want to stick with more generic commentary on current affairs. Just don't make him a mini Jacob Rees-Mogg - sure to scare the living daylights out of all of his classmates.

I grew up in a time when Halloween costumes were, first and foremost, about being scary. The ancient superstitions were still lingering and we'd dress up in a plastic bin bag and a mask handmade out of an old cornflakes box.

I miss those days when even chubby kids, yet to get type 2 diabetes, were given sweets rather than a concerned phone call to their parents about the dangers of childhood obesity.

The origins of Halloween are in our ancient festival of Samhain, when spirits were released from the Otherworld and walked among us. That's why it's supposed to be a bit scary. Scary is the overarching theme of Halloween.

Axes, dismembered limbs, eyeballs dangling from empty sockets, skeletons hanging in windows. But 'no scary costumes' say the schools that have no problem teaching these same children they're all going to die in 10 years' time in a fiery, mass extinction if the Green Party don't get their way and have us all knitting our own houses.

There's nothing scary about a five-year-old in a tiny witch hat. The kids dressed up as ghosts aren't a threat to their classmates and the doorstep pumpkins will be safely composting in the brown bin by November 1. Still, I'll be playing it safe this year and bringing it back to basics: black lingerie paired with cat ears.

Costume bans in schools aren't what's needed at Halloween. Just a good dollop of common sense. And I'd say that left to their own devices, most school children and parents will figure it out on their own.

A very scary thought for the self-appointed PC watchdogs out there.

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Irish Independent