Halloween – Deep Dark Thoughts

Halloween 2020-Style

Halloween is my absolute favorite holiday of them all, and it will be here in just a couple days. I love everything about this time of year: the trick or treaters, the candy, haunted houses, horror movies, and even the Celtic history behind the celebration, where they lit bonfires and wore costumes to ward of ghosts.

And this year was going to be extra special because Halloween falls on a Saturday and will occur on the night of a full moon. An ideal situation.

I say, “was,” because with the public health situation that we currently find ourselves in it is unlikely that very many people will be celebrating this rare concurrence of events. There won’t be the parties or gatherings that have marked previous years as people this time around choose to stay home and observe the date quietly on their own.

Which is a huge loss.

Personally, I think kids should be allowed to go out on Halloween. Think about it. They will all be wearing masks anyway. Except for a few clumps of children that occasionally gather on the same porch at the same time, they will all be spaced out to a socially acceptable distance as they run around out of control throughout the various neighborhoods. And, since past tragedies have eliminated handmade food and unsealed packaging, the candies are all individually wrapped as well as sealed inside a larger bag, so there is little chance of contamination due to contact with other people.

If you are already sending your child out to wander the streets in the night, wearing dark clothing and masks that impair their vision, to knock on the doors of people they have never met, how could it possibly be any more dangerous this year? Let the kids have their fun. They’ve been cooped up for about eight months now, they need a chance to blow off some steam.

And the parents could probably use a night off as well. How long has it been since you had an evening to yourself with no screaming, bored, whining rugrats crawling around underfoot? Probably too long.

My situation is a little different. My kids are all grown up. (Physically. Mentally, I still really worry about those two.) They haven’t done the trick-or-treating thing in many years. Instead, they typically hang out with friends and do whatever it is that young adults do on their own. I don’t know exactly what that is, anymore. I try not to think too hard about what it is they are actually doing since I remember what I was doing when I was in my early twenties, and there is just absolutely no excuse for that kind of behavior.

They should be ashamed of themselves.

This year, however, they will be hanging out at home with mom and dad. It’s just going to be one more day where my two grown kids are in the house with me all evening, without a break. Just like yesterday. Just like the day before, and the day before, and the day before, and…

Everybody loses.

All I can say is, thank god for television and alcohol.

Can you imagine if this pandemic had occurred before we had electronic distractions to take our minds off of the fact that we have been spending time with the same couple of people nonstop for the past six months? What if the only entertainment we had was watching the paint peel off of the walls and (god forbid) talking to each other? I think I would have murdered my entire family by now.

This Halloween, there won’t even be any kids trick-or-treating in my neighborhood to add some excitement to the evening. No smiling faces. No begging for candy. And no handmade costumes where I have to try and guess, “Are you a zombie, or a hobo, or did you get hit by a car before you got here?”

The lack of trick-or-treaters in my area isn’t just because of the pandemic, however. It also has to do with my location. Stray kids don’t usually come to my house as I live out in the middle of nowhere and it takes about half an hour to walk from one house to the next. I actually haven’t had a trick-or-treater turn up at my door since 2011 when I moved to my present residence. Still, every year I watch the front door hopefully, waiting to see if some lost waif is going to brave the darkness and the distance to ring my doorbell and hold out his empty candy bag. I long for the day I can smile at the wandering child and tell him,

“I don’t have any candy. What are you doing out here, and where the hell are your parents?”

I mean, seriously. It would take a lunatic to allow their kid to wander around in my neighborhood hoping for someone to hand out candy. It’s like child abuse.

Happy Halloween!

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Farewell to Candy Corn

October has come to an end. It is time to say goodbye to Halloween, Trick-or-Treating, and bowls of bite-sized candy treats. This makes me sad, but at least there is a bright side. There will be no more candy corn in my house for another year.

I have never understood why candy corn was created or how it has continued to exist for so long. There is nothing about these tiny little nuggets of nastiness that would make me understand why anyone buys them or, God forbid, eats them. They are neither candy, nor corn, but rather tri-colored plastic chunks designed to make children cry.

Even the color of this stuff is off-putting to the heartiest of appetites. Orange, yellow, and white. There is nothing else in nature that is orange, yellow, and white and is the slightest bit edible. Actually, let me amend that statement: There is nothing in nature that is orange, yellow, and white and is the slightest bit edible.

If a bird saw a caterpillar that was the same color as candy corn, it would immediately turn and fly off in the opposite direction. Even an animal with a brain that tiny knows those colors probably mean the item is highly toxic and it’s not a good idea to try to eat it.

People should have the same good sense.

I understand that people have different tastes. I get that. My dad used to love corned beef with cabbage and liver with onions. He grew up poor, and the few times his family had meat on the table it was usually one of those two things. While I would rather go hungry for a week than eat liver and onions, my dad had very good memories of eating the stuff as a child, so I get why he likes it.

Candy corn is a different matter entirely. It is nobody’s idea of a treat. Putting candy corn in your mouth is on par with eating a scented candle. You can do it, but you won’t enjoy it and everybody who sees you do it is going to think you’re a little weird.

When I went out trick-or-treating as a kid, there were always certain houses in the neighborhood that I would avoid. I didn’t avoid the houses because of the people that lived there, I didn’t care too much who was handing out candy if it was the good stuff. I avoided the houses that handed out the items that a kid my age considered to be “crap.” You know what I’m referring to: apples, toothbrushes, pennies, and other items adults would call “healthy alternatives.”

But I would happily take a bruised and rotting apple over one of those small cellophane bags full of candy corn.

Conversations with my friends on Halloween night often sounded like this:

Friend: “Are you going to Mr. Smith’s house?”

Me: “Yup!”

Friend: “You know he murdered four kids on Halloween last year, right?”

Me: “I know, but he’s handing out full-sized candy bars.”

Friend: “What about the Johnson’s house. They have candy corn.”

Me: “I’ll go over to their house later. I have to get some eggs and toilet paper first.”

Candy corn is a scourge on our world. They are triangular shards of misery that I am convinced were invented only to suck the joy out of the word “candy.”

And the worst part of all is … my wife likes them.

I don’t know why. Perhaps there is some deep-seeded childhood trauma that makes her think she likes eating candy corn. Her taste buds may be damaged. Or she may simply have horrible decision-making skills.

She did agree to marry me after all, so her mental capacity has always been suspect.

But whatever the reason, she does like them, and that means that every October, the little nausea bombs turn up in my house. They are like vermin that only move in for one month out of the year. It could be worse, but it could certainly be better.

As we move into November, I can rest easier knowing that my house will be candy corn free for the next eleven months. But I can never completely relax. I know that it is only a matter of time before they show up once more.

There must be people other than my wife that buy candy corn. They wouldn’t keep making the stuff if someone wasn’t buying it.

Would they?

Or maybe, no one is buying it, but there is some massive, Illuminati-level conspiracy to keep candy corn around. Is it possible that candy corn is part of some kind of macabre, government experiment? Are scientists trying to discover how long it will take before children are brought to the point of outright rebellion and rioting over the presence of candy corn in their trick-or-treat bags?

I suppose it’s possible. Even probable.

In fact, now that I think about it, I see no other plausible explanation.

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A Good Old Fashioned Halloween

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 1^st are going to thank me for all the fun they had the night before.

Happy Halloween!

Enjoying Deep Dark Thoughts? Follow me on Facebook so you don’t miss a post. Just go to my page and click the “Like” button to receive updates on my blog and other projects.

And you can follow me on Twitter @gallenwilbanks.