Next week is Halloween, and all over the world there will be children dressing up in costumes and knocking on their neighbors’ doors asking for handouts. These wandering vagrants-in-training will be wearing all the latest safety gear our modern world can provide them; bright day-glow colored costumes that stand out for hundreds of feet, flashing lights attached to various body parts, and open-faced masks that allow for full peripheral vision while crossing busy streets.
But where is the fun in all that?
I miss the good old days when children had to take their lives in their hands if they wanted to pester the neighbors for those little compressed chunks of sugar and chocolate. If the rewards come too easily, nobody truly appreciates what they receive. After a few near misses with cars in poorly lit streets and dark alleyways, kids of my generation learned to truly savor every fun-sized candy bar and cellophane-wrapped hard candy.
I remember one year of trick-or-treating as a young child, I was wearing a store-bought dinosaur costume. The main costume was a dark green, vinyl one-piece that covered me from neck to feet. Of course, the material was so cheap one of the sleeves had already torn most of the way off while I was putting it on, but it mostly held together. The color was so dark, car headlights could not illuminate it no matter how close the driver came to running me over. I felt like a ninja, cartwheeling through roadways as traffic blew past completely unaware of my presence.
The mask I had was a hard plastic thing that covered my entire face and was held in place by a single elastic strap that went around my head. The strap was attached to the mask with a single staple on each side, adding the risk that at any time it might break and the elastic would recoil and snap out one of my eyes. Or at least leave a nice red welt on the side of my cheek.
There were two small eye holes cut out of the mask. The holes were about the size of a quarter and they were placed way too close together to allow for any peripheral vision or depth perception. They were perfectly designed for maximum risk of injury to the child wearing the mask. I’m not sure if that was a design flaw, or a pre-planned feature of the costume.
Every year, we lost a few people while they were out trick-or-treating. But those were just the slow ones that let their attention wander during crucial moments of wending through the neighborhoods. The survivors came away faster, smarter and more experienced than their failed counterparts. It was a harsh, but effective, selection process. The winners got candy. The losers got lovely newspaper articles written about them the next morning.
Keep in mind, the world was not so badly overpopulated in the 1970’s and 1980’s as it is now. I think that may have been due to the annual culling of the children we call Halloween. In the 1990’s, people demanded children’s costumes be safer and the obvious result of that trend is that now the world has way too many people living in it.
Maybe the old ways weren’t so bad after all?
We have made child panhandling too safe these days. The fun has disappeared along with the risk.
Several years ago, the United States even pushed back the end of Daylight Saving Time a week so children would still have sunlight during the prime trick-or-treating hours.
What was the purpose of that? Trick-or-treating in daylight is like wearing skis in the desert. You can do it, but it makes no sense to anybody watching.
Trick-or-treating was meant to be done in the dark. Why else would people put on costumes? In the dark, that vampire costume looks cool. In the daylight, you just look like the weird kid nobody at school wants to talk to. You know the one: the overly pale kid that always overdresses for whatever event he shows up at.
A cape and a tuxedo just don’t cut it when the sun is still shining.
I think our current generation has weeded out everything that made Halloween fun. We might as well be keeping the kids at home and handing them a pile of candy purchased earlier that day at the grocery store. Costumes can be sweatpants and t-shirts as they watch TV and eat their “loser candy.”
I say we need to bring back the cheap plastic costumes and the suffocation risks that came with it. Start remaking the hard plastic masks with no breathing hole over the mouth and zero visibility for anything that isn’t standing directly in front of you. And change the clocks so the sun goes down at 3 PM on Halloween night.
Are we going to lose a few kids in the aftermath? Of course, we are. But the ones that live to see November 1st are going to thank me for all the fun they had the night before.
Happy Halloween!
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