"An adult. You?"
Not many trick-or-treaters came by for the Reese's cups last night. I wound up eating two and handing out ten or twelve.
The kids a few houses down had a massive Halloween party going, with cars parked down both sides of the street at 11:00, when I started wrapping things up for the day. When did Halloween stop being a holiday for kids to put on masks and get candy and start being about twenty- and thirty-somethings getting dressed up and vomiting in their bushes after too many Icehouses?
When did parents start shuttling kids from block to block in their cars?
When I was younger, you got "too old and too cool" to trick-or-treat sometime around your freshman year in high school. I know I had at least four last night who were about ready for college.
Sigh. What an uncool holiday it's become. Maybe I'll just leave the porch light off next year...
People are frightened to send their kids out alone. We watched our 13 year old daughter at every house. Paranoid? sure. I'll cop to that.
ReplyDelete0 children rolled up here sadly.
ReplyDeleteNext year maybe a party for my son (11) and his friends.
Gmac
I had quite a few show up last night. Most of them were even age appropriate. I handed out candy and watched Return of the Living Dead A nice relaxing evening.
ReplyDeleteWhen? I think this is one you can legitimately blame on the Boomers -- or our parents. The trucking of kids around had to have started some time in the '50s. There's a monologue/intro by Paul Stookey on a PPM song (can't remember which, now) wherein he describes the phenom. That was recorded in the early '60s, and matters were already pretty well established.
ReplyDeleteI remember the first time I participated in such an expedition. I came home with a 20# brown-paper grocery sack full of candy (which my mother promptly confiscated, scanned for danger, and rationed out to me over the next six months, as I recall, but that's Mom). It kinda ruined the whole thing for me and I never did Halloween with much gusto thereafter.
M
Icehouse. Oh, Lord you had to say "Icehouse." I guess I have a few too many associations there 'cos I actually LOLled.
ReplyDeleteFrickin' Icehouse.
We only had about a third of the houses in our neighborhood handing out candy this year.
ReplyDeleteI refuse to give up on it though. Even if I'm the last house with a light on, I'll be handing out candy to whatever kids show up on Halloween.
I have two trick or treat aged kids. Our Haloween consisted of a stop at grannies house and then a trip to the local walmart for a bag of candy.
ReplyDeleteSafe and the kids don't get a lot of unwanted junk to throw away.
Has worked for us for the last five years.
Will
I leave my porch light on every night and refuse to turn it off for Halloween. If you don't want a passel of trick-or-treaters (of any age group) you could do what I do and hand out pencils. I've been doing that for the last 3 or 4 years and the number of trick-or-treaters has steadily declined. Last night people knocked on my door 3 times (total of 5 kids) and 3 of those kids were my neighbor's grandkids. I rather suspect there are conversations like this going on: "Look, the light is on at that house" followed by "No, don't go there, she hands out pencils".
ReplyDeleteI will turn the light on, and will have candy, and will smile (now that could be really scary) as I talk to the children in their different costumes. Might even be sitting in a rocker on the porch one of these years in costume without my teeth and a corncob pipe and a jar of almost shine, beside the hound and the shotgun... with King James open on my lap. Depending on Tuesday's turn out, of course. The right size children with the right size minds need Halloween, you should have seen my wife's first one - she was so happy giving away candy to all the costumed little kids - in 1972, her first year in America.
ReplyDeleteI will have you know that I did not vomit in anyone's bushes.
ReplyDeleteI also drank the coolest beer ever.
Pencils - now that's an idea.
ReplyDeleteI made some homemade Reese's and handed them out to the few neighbor kids after they got home from school. I turned off the porch light, made some tea (I was on call) and watched the original "The Thing".
I heard only a handful of kids walk giggling past the house.
When I was a kid, we went alone but were told to only do our block, where my folks knew everyone. We really hustled and could get TWO blocks done, and didn't say anything. The folks checked the candy to make sure everything was wrapped proper but let us keep everything but the Sugar Daddy suckers. Mom had some ingrown fear those would rip out our molars. We'd wait a couple weeks until she forgot about them, and steal them back during a late night raid in dark colored jammmies.
The hold-on-to-childhood movement continues unabated. Several of my apartments threw a collective party which spelled idiocy sprawling over about an acre of the property. I got dressed at 1:30 and confronted them. Oh crap! Mom's mad! I wanted to spank every last one of them. I WILL fine the hosts. however. Get 'em where it hurts.
ReplyDeleteWord verification: winis
Quite.
Here in Omaha we had a fairly traditional Halloween. Lots of elementary school age kids with parents chaperoning. Good time for the kids too, as our grandson showed us that his treats included a lot of the full sized candy bars, not just the 'mini' or 'snack' size we handed out. If I were his age I'd be shouting "SCORE" and be happy for all the goodies. My wife and I sat out on the porch with glasses of wine and had a nice time too. Thank God for life in 'fly-over' country.
ReplyDelete- Alan J.
Me? Roman Armor and ecoutremonts.
ReplyDeleteReally puts the "Wha?" look on the little one's faces.
I enjoyed it in my day, and I'm sure going to see Them enjoy it in theirs.
I had a frantic call from SWMBO as I was leaving work at 7:15 last night- "Stop and get candy!".
ReplyDeleteI suggested it might be too late for that, but I would. Got to the house at straight up 8PM, and we opened up all the bags- I got fun-sized M&M packs- into a bowl and flipped on the porch light. Within 15 seconds we were swarmed. Even doling them out one to a customer, at 8:15 we were empty, and the light promptly went off.
Odd thing is, 95% of the kids at the door were Hispanic, and with parental units. My neighborhood is well mixed, ethnically, but Hispanics are noticeably unrepresented in that mix. The remaining 5% was far east Asian, which is a small percentage for my neighborhood, but granted, I took a realtively small sample size.
Heh. Verification word
pyratera. Yeah, I feel like I had pirates on the ground.
Regards,
Rabbit.
Between 7 and 8:30 I had no fewer than 30 ghoulish visitors, maximum age (so far as I could guess) about 11.
ReplyDelete(I shut down after that because of treat depletion.)
aww - Halloween has got to be about the *funnest* holiday out there. Sure there's surly teens not ready to give it up, and cheap skank costumes galore, but even with all that it's still just plain fun.
ReplyDeleteYou get a day to play dressup, cook all kinds of wonderful noms, hang with friends - and the costumed kids are SOOOO CUTE.
Awesome. Second best to Christmas I think. Thanksgiving and Independence Day are more meaningful yeah.. but Halloween is just FUN. :)
None showed up here, same as last year and the year before that.
ReplyDeleteI remember people shuttlign kids around (out west here) when I was in H.S. already - about when the underage lawn-barf parties started.
We had 60 kids, all but 3 under about 11. And LOTS of tiny ones that could barely say 'trick or treat' and had no clue WHY they were saying it. But when they did the old man holding the candy and the old lady holding the dog got all sweet on them and handed 'em candy, so they figured whatever the deal was, they liked it. And so did we, so it was a success.
ReplyDeleteAnd there are 12 packs of candy left this morning for us. No eggs on the windows, no smashed pumpkins in the street, no sirens... I'd call it a great time. Now, if we could only get this kind of performance on New Years Eve. What a zoo!
I dressed up as a character from my latest movie, Necroville.
ReplyDeleteThough as exec, and thus having access to the actual costumer, I'm not sure it counts as dressing up. per se. *shrug*
I think myself and the wife looked pretty good, though.
http://www.izmm.com/images/Ogre_Spsh_Anniversary2008.png (I'm the one with the beard. ;) )
-Ogre (no, the other one.)
Rabbit- the same thing happened here. Not at our house, which seems to live in a Trick or Treating dead zone, but at my in-laws' who live a few miles from us; they said they saw large vans full of kids pulling up and pouring out hispanic kids from down in the Espanola valley. (At which point they turned out the light.)
ReplyDeleteThe phenomenon that's been annoying the hell out of me is the trend of parents moving trick-or-treating to a different night to suit their schedule better. W-T-F?! What the hell is left to Halloween other than candy, then? I remember being seven or eight and the holiday having some actual mystique to it... and yes, I walked, and while my father didn't let me go alone, he stayed back and let me FEEL like I was, a little.
My parents didn't go with us, but my brothers were a lot older than me, and were forced to cart me around. I LOVE Halloween, I love dressing up and acting out, it's just so much fun!
ReplyDeleteHey, one day out of the year to act a little crazy is not a bad deal.
We usually leave the light off, even if we don't go out for the evening. This year was different, though. Friday was our travel day back from Florida, so we were beat to start out with.
ReplyDeleteAdd to that, our local team won the World Series(GO PHILLIES!!!) and the city gave the parade on a workday to guarantee a large turnout. They also begged the people to take public transit in and back out to keep car congestion to a minimum. Good theory, but outbound paradegoers had to wait as much as 3 hours for trains out, the system was so overwhelmed.
By the time we were able to shoehorn ourselves into our own neighborhood, the parade revelers, estimated at 2 million, had left the ball park and were making their way home, getting drunker with every block travelled, thanks to all the local bars having their doors open. Curiously, the number of trick-or-treaters was low this year.
Well It hink the carting the kids to another neighbourhood started when some neighbourhoods just aren't very kid friendly.
ReplyDeleteAround here the popular neighbourhoods are the "old suburbs", small lots, houses close together, narrower streets.
The exurbs where you have to hike 20min from house to house. ugh. The "not so nice" neighbourhoods where the kids needs s swat team escort... The high rise neighbourhoods, the wierd condo developments, none of those are conducive to a nice experience.
Had 150 bags of various chips when tha night started... 15 left at the end. That's 135 kiddies came by. Some of the little ones were quite a trip.
ReplyDeletePersonally I skipped on "beggar's night" this year for a couple of reasons. Last year I intimidated the older tweenies by open carrying as I passed out the goodies. Parents with kids didn't have a problem and one mom even pointed out the owb "costume accessory" I was wearing to her youngster in fatigues. :-) Go GI Mom! Most of the teenagers crossed the road at my house and avoided me. Of course a week or so later I got a nice visit where they "decorated" my place. Thus the major reason for skipping.
ReplyDelete