No eggs. No sneak attacks. No cemeteries. But joy nonetheless.
Halloween has not been fun for me in a long time.
As a child, I spent years trick-or-treating and enjoyed every minute of it. When I was fairly young, my parents stopped accompanying me and my siblings on our Halloween adventures. This allowed us to cover an enormous amount of ground, stay out later than was advisable and verbally assault the woman on our street who gave out sandwich bags full of walnuts or homemade rice crispy squares without fear of parental disapproval. Our candy hauls were unwieldy and the independence that we were granted was exhilarating.
Then I became a teenager and the attempts to accumulate Halloween treats ended and the tricking part of Halloween took over. It was a glorious time in my childhood, filled with strings of toilet paper, countless cartons of eggs, hide-and-go-seek in the cemetery and elaborate plans to frighten unsuspecting children and their even less suspecting parental escorts. We hid in trees, buried ourselves in leaf piles, crawled under parked cars and did everything we could to put the fright back in Halloween.
While it’s true that I was known to egg a house from time to time (including the home of the high school science teacher on more than one occasion), most of my eggs were reserved for friends and the unfortunate passersby.
My hometown became so ravaged by this destructive behavior that the local grocery store stopped selling eggs on Halloween in order to help curb the mayhem.
Halloween essentially became a time when children and teenagers ruled the night.
Then I grew too old to continue this behavior, though it admittedly took much longer than it should have, and Halloween transformed again into a evening of costume parties, scary movies and midnight trips to the Rocky Horror Picture Show.
All excellent ways to spend a Halloween, but not nearly as fun as being perched precariously on a tree limb, firing eggs at unsuspecting targets.
Last night the unabashed joy of Halloween returned for the first time as we took Clara and Charlie trick-or-treating.
Though this was not Clara’s first Halloween, it was the first year that she fell in love with trick-or-treating and all the trappings of Halloween. She was leading the charge, demanding that we find more houses to visit and more candy to collect.
It was so much fun to watch.
Ironically, Halloween almost didn’t happen for us. Our little contrarian (I have no idea where she gets this) initially said that she had no desire to trick-or-treat and refused to even consider donning a costume. Then she made her first poopy on the potty, declared it, “Beautiful! Not yucky at all!” and everything changed. She ran upstairs, donned a tutu, pronounced herself a ballerina and was ready to go.
Though she asked to be carried up the first set of stairs and would not ring the first doorbell, by the third house was pulling me along, saying at one point, “I love Halloween so much, Daddy! This is fun!” She was enthusiastic, giggly, polite and genuinely excited about every part of Halloween.
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Then there was the moment when she turned to Elysha after being handed a bag of pretzels and asked, “Why did she give me pretzels?”
Like father, like daughter.
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Finally, it was Charlie’s first Halloween, though all this meant was that he was stuffed into a dinosaur costume and dragged around the neighborhood. But by the time we arrived home, he had mastered his impression of a dinosaur.
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