The Essentials of Judging Halloween Costumery

On a later date, I will have to publish my philosophy on prankery, which developed one day at the office as we discussed various important criteria and categories of pranking, the latter of which includes:

• College dorm pranking
• Office pranking
• Family pranking
• Relationship pranking
• Long-distance pranking
• Pranking strangers

But as I said, more on that later.  Because now, it is getting close to the deadline to share any thoughts on Halloween and so I must put out my thoughts on possible the best holiday of all.  (Sure Christmas has presents, but Halloween has costumes).

So here I give you my essentials to judging Halloween costumery.  Below follows an approximate scoring guide to judging Halloween costumes.  Please use it and share it with your friends this holiday season.

First Principles:

• Certain categories of Halloween costumes exist.

• Some are divisions such as
• store-bought and homemade
• generic (ex. ghost) and specific (ex. Batman)
• gendered and neutral
• sexy and non-sexy
• recently topical (ex. bruised Tiger Woods) and timeless traditional (witch), etc.
• planned-in-advance and last-minute
• "in-character" and normal everyday
• unique and popular
• individual and group

• Some divisions are skewed in favor of one of their characteristics.  Others are neutral. 
• Homemade is better than store-bought
• Specific is better than generic
• Recently topical is better than timeless
• Unique is better than popular
• "In-character" is better than normal everyday 
• Groups are better than individuals

The Scoring:  At your next Halloween event, scores costumes following these guidelines:

• Start with a base of 50 points.

• Award up to 10 points for store-bought, based on your judgment of the expense and difficulty of acquiring this costume.
• For homemade, award 5 points for each piece of the costume that had to be either made or found.

• Award up to 10 points for generic costumes, based on the execution relative to previously seen traditional examples.
• Award up to 20 points for specific characters, with more points being awarded depending on the disparity between how often you have seen the character in your life and the number of times you have seen that costume.  One-of-a-kind specific yet popular characters get the full 20.

• Non-sexy, neither add or deduct points.
• Sexy, add up to 15 points for truly sexy costumes and deduct up to 25 points as needed to penalize poorly judged sexiness.

• For timeless costumes, award a maximum of 10 points deducting 1 point for each other time you have seen that particular costume through that Halloween season.
• For topical costumes, award up to 10 points each for a) the newsworthiness of the reference and b) the "wow" factor of obscurity of the reference.  There is an obvious tradeoff between the two, but it can be precisely calibrated for the full 20 points.

• Costumes planned more than 3 weeks in advance get a 20 point bonus, but must deduct 2 points for each additional week of planning time.  (Seriously, if you have been working since August, go get a life.)
• Last minute costumes must deduct 15 points, but can earn it back by getting 5 points each in the following categories, a) self-explanatory costume, b) made from available materials, c) number of costume elements and props that are on target.

• An additional 15 points is awarded for each truly unique costume.
• An additional 10 points is deducted for having a costume that anyone else had that Halloween season.  (We have to encourage variety).

• Normal everyday is not awarded extra points, but "in-character" costumes receive up to 5 points for each of the following:
• Physical presence in character
• Voice and catchphrases in character
• In-character actions and responses towards others
• Consistent commitment to the role

• Finally, individuals receive no added points, but groups receive up to 5 bonus points for each member (with a cap at 5 members).  1 point is given per member when each one is only loosely related and the full maximum of 5 is given when everyone is coordinated.

And there concludes the Halloween costume scoring method.  I am not even going to bother totaling up what the maximum number of possible points could be.  That was never the point.  The point is that Halloween costumes are probably the best part of the best holiday.  So there has got to be a way to judge when it is done right.

So now tell me what I could have done better and what I forgot to include.