The first thing I notice is the label. Not the ghost, not the pumpkin, not the black-and-white speckle that runs across the rectangle like static on a television. The label. A white ruled rectangle, headed COMPOSITION in plain capitals, sitting on the chest where a name tag might go. Inside the ruled lines, an outlined ghost and an outlined pumpkin, drawn thin, almost like a child’s tracing. The binding strip runs down the left side, dark and solid. The whole thing is a printed notebook cover, not a physical notebook, and the shirt is a costume of a school supply.
I have seen a lot of teacher Halloween shirts. Most of them shout. Teacher Squad. Witch Way to the Staff Room. I Teach Tiny Humans. They are loud, and they are meant to be read across a parking lot. This one is quiet. It does not say teacher anywhere on the visible artwork. It says composition. It says notebook. It says this is the thing you write in. The ghost and the pumpkin are small, contained, almost incidental. The design trusts you to know what a composition notebook is and why a group of adults might dress as one.
That trust is the argument. A composition notebook is not a flashy object. It is the cheapest, most ordinary writing surface in the building. Black-and-white speckled cover, sewn binding, wide-ruled pages. It is what you buy when you need to write something down and you do not need it to be beautiful. It is what a student uses for a journal, what a teacher uses for attendance, what a parish secretary uses for the list of quinceañeras and the list of funeral readings and the list of people who still have not picked up their posada invitations. It is a container for the ordinary.
When you wear a composition notebook as a costume, you are not dressing as a teacher. You are dressing as the surface a teacher writes on. That is a different claim. It says: the work is not the performance. The work is the record. The work is the page that gets filled and turned and filled again. The ghost and the pumpkin are there because it is Halloween, but they are drawn inside the ruled lines, as if the holiday itself has to fit inside the margin.
I think about what a group costume asks of the people wearing it. A matching shirt is not a uniform. It is an invitation. It says: we are doing this together, and we are doing it on purpose. The composition notebook design is especially good for that because it is inherently plural. One notebook is a notebook. A stack of notebooks is a classroom. A row of people wearing the same speckled cover is a faculty meeting, a grade-level team, a staff that decided to be silly on October 31 instead of pretending the day is not happening.
The shirt is available at the Quirky Cotton Collective listing, and the design is what it is: a printed notebook cover, dark binding on the left, white label, ghost and pumpkin inside. I am not going to tell you it is soft or that it fits well or that the teachers at a particular school wore it and loved it. I have not worn it. I have only looked at the artwork, and the artwork is clear enough to read.
What the artwork asks of the person standing next to you is a small thing. It asks them to recognize the object. It asks them to remember their own composition notebooks, the ones with the marble covers that cost fifty cents at the start of the school year, the ones that got dog-eared and stained and filled with handwriting that changed as the year went on. It asks them to see a group of adults and think: oh, they are dressed as the thing we all wrote in. That is not a punchline. It is a shared memory.
In a parish, we have a word for that kind of shared memory. We call it tradition, and we mean the things we hand down not because they are impressive but because they are ours. The composition notebook is not a sacred object. But it is a common one, and common things carry a kind of weight when a group agrees to wear them together. The ghost and the pumpkin are the feast day. The notebook is the ordinary time that makes the feast day possible.
So here is the assignment, if you want one. If you are a teacher, a staff, a team of any kind, and you are thinking about a group costume for Halloween, consider the composition notebook. Not because it is clever, but because it is plain. It does not ask you to perform enthusiasm. It asks you to stand next to someone else in the same ordinary cover and let the label do the talking. The ghost and the pumpkin will take care of the holiday. The ruled lines will take care of the rest.
Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner.