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There was a time when kids looked forward to the four most important days of the year - Christmas, Easter, Fourth of July, and Halloween. Conservative bucketheads didn’t kvetch about people stealing Christmas right out from under their holier than thou noses. Everyone, regardless of religion, enjoyed a nice secular Easter egg hunt and joyfully biting the ears off a chocolate bunny. Citizens and immigrants, legal or illegal, enjoyed some fireworks and a hot dog. And finally, Halloween was never an occasion for a nutcase to stop burning Harry Potter books long enough to condemn Halloween as some communist, satanic soirée.

Oh, the times - how they’ve changed.

I lived in a neighborhood where 8 and 9-year old kids could wander around in the dark, unattended, wearing dark costumes soaked in toxins and impregnated with highly flammable materials. There was no Halloween Superstore because there was no mall to put it in. If you didn’t buy your costume at Woolworth’s, you wore a DIY affair. Sheets with jagged eye-holes were popular, as were hobos - happier, better-fed versions of today’s homeless. Back then, hoboism was a lifestyle choice, not a crushing social disease.

No Animatronic Ghouls, Thanks
In those days, the extent of Halloween decoration was a crude jack-o-lantern carved by Mom and a butter knife and costing about a buck if you got rooked at Al’s Market. There were no animatronic ghouls, Las Vegas lighting displays, or professional pumpkin carvers with templates and Henckles’ professional pumpkin knives carving amazing likenesses of Dick Cheney on unlucky gourds. Hell, we even made pumpkin pie out of the innards when we were done.

School day Halloweens were exquisitely lengthy and bereft of any actual learning. They were filled with candy-fueled daydreams and orange and chocolate cupcakes from the school cafeteria. The bell rang and the kids took off like a brace of quail flying in front of an old Republican’s face on a Cheney hunting trip.

The unspoken rule was to trick-or-treat until you were 12 and do your 13th year sans costume and a simple growly smirk. After the little kids packed it in, you toilet-papered your science teacher’s house and threw godawful candy apples at mailboxes until curfew at 10. If the local cop knicked you, you’d get a quick ride home in the patrol car to face an ass-tanning and two weeks without TV. Kids today are on their third drug conviction and second rape by that time.

“Don’t Eat My Butterfingers!”
There were no razor blades, drugs, crushed glass, or other flotsam jammed deep into popcorn balls. Kids didn’t pass their candy through x-rays and metal detectors or get frisked for tell-tale signs of sexual abuse when they got home. They just showed off their haul to Mom and Dad, shuffled exhausted off to bed, and awoke to find the ‘rents had eaten all the Butterfingers and left them with nothing but Jr. Mints and licorice whips.

Today, the novelty of Halloween wears off on kids when they’re five going on 35. They’re accompanied by a Blackwater convoy along their appointed candy-panhandling rounds in a mall where everything, up to and including their blood pressure, is carefully monitored. Only hermetically sealed candy is permitted and anything homemade strictly verboten. We’ve created a generation of fear-crazed mini-adults who are taught from birth to shoot off flares if anyone over 15 speaks to them. For them, Halloween has become just another chore, like hauling a backpack so pregnant with books it takes a sturdy squire to suit them up for school. They live in a world where what little fun that is left in this once-glorious holiday is over the minute they throw their 15th tandem in the squished eyeball aisle at Bootastic Bob’s Halloween store.

There’s something incredibly sad about turning kids old before their time. Is it really necessary to suck every ounce of childhood from their bodies? We should let them have at least a little fun.

So go ahead and let them eat themselves sick - or maybe even skip school tomorrow. It’s good for ‘em.

Besides, you might be lucky enough to score a Butterfinger or two while they’re praying to the porcelain god and that’s a good Halloween in anybody’s book.

 

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 31st, 2007 at 6:40 pm and is filed under BIO, Contributors, Family Values. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.