The Strictly presenter wants to warn other parents about the dangers of fancy dress costumes after her daughter's witch outfit caught fire in 2014.
Strictly presenter Claudia Winkleman has confessed she hates Halloween and wants to warn other parents about flammable costumes two years after her daughter was burned in an accident.
Claudia, who hosts Strictly Come Dancing with co-star Tess Daly, said she did not want any other parents to go through the ordeal suffered by her own family when her then eight-year-old's witch costume caught fire in 2014.
“I don't like Halloween because two years ago it turned out our screams were real,” she wrote in a column in Style magazine.
“Thanks to the extraordinary NHS everything is now OK. I just don't want any of you to go through what we did.
“So, get yourself a witchy costume, but please get a safe one.”
She joked she had “tried to cancel” Halloween celebrations, but “turns out that was overly ambitious”.
Claudia's daughter Matilda was treated for serious burns after her supermarket-bought witch costume of hat, cape, stripy tights and a flowing skirt was set alight by a naked flame.
Claudia took three weeks off from Strictly to be by her side, later speaking to Watchdog about the need for all costumes to meet British flammability standards.
“I hate Halloween,” she wrote this weekend. “I loathe wobbly skeleton wall hangings, gouged eyeball sweets, ghoulish pumpkin faces and sticky spiders' webs
“I can't bear screechy door creaks and drawn-out screams.”
She has said previously of the accident: “It’s life changing, but not life defining. It was definitely life changing for me.
“I can’t remember life before it.
“I wish I had been dressed as the witch is mainly all I wish, that it had happened to me.
“She went up, and I don’t want that to happen to another child.
“I would like parents to – just on Halloween, just to think about what they’re going to put their kids in because I didn’t, and it cost us.”
