Would dressing like a dead person be wrong?

So Halloween is coming up. I haven’t dressed up for Halloween since I was… 6. When I was living overeas, you didn’t celebrate Halloween, I guess you could say it was illegal. Then when we moved back to the States, it just wasn’t something we did. The ‘dark’ side of Halloween became apparant, so we handed out candy to the few kids that came to our house, but other than that, we didn’t do anything else.

So now I’m in the “real” world, and my office is doing a Halloween party, with a costume contest. There is a “group” prize, so my boss wanted to do something with our department together. We could decorate the cubies and then dress together. Well, the first idea that came up, compliments of one of my reports (and just a weird person altogether) was to make our department a graveyard, and we would dress as dead people.

I was immediately awkward and uncomfortable with this idea. I don’t like the idea of making everything look like a graveyard. I am very sensitive to issues dealing with spirits, ghouls, ghosts, etc. I’ve had some some experiences with evil spirits – so I do not joke around with this at all. So, the idea of making everything around me intentially dark and evil-feeling, I don’t like it.

I haven’t spoken against it yet because I wanted to figure out what exactly made me so uncomfortable. So, I don’t like the dark and evil feeling it gives me. I also don’t like the idea of being a living corpse. To me that is creepy, and it is not something that I should be focusing on. Why focus on something that is evil? Why do you want to look at that kind of stuff, dwell on that kind of stuff?

I don’t believe in karma, but I do believe that what you surround yourself with, what you watch, what you read, listen to, what you speak, all of that influences who you are. It makes an impact on your ideologies and how you see the world.

And I don’t want anything like that near me… well, you know, all I have to do is say that I’m not comfortable with the idea. If they want to do it, they can. I won’t stand in the way, I just won’t participate.

I don’t need to go into details, because it is a very personal reason. Details would only confuse people and bring about unnecessary questions.