Trick or Treat!

Although we live in a busy neighborhood, we’ve never gotten into the Trick-or-Treating thing on Halloween. We haven’t actually had that back-and-forth discussion on Halloween, what it celebrates, what is it’s origin and how does that reflect in the lives of our children. It hasn’t really been pertinent…yet.

This year I was asked often if we were taking Emry trick-or-treating. The answer is pretty simple: not this year, she’s still a bit young, she doesn’t need the candy and Ed and I certainly don’t need it either. I think most people think we’re just practical parents versus the ones who think it’s cute to dress their infant up in a pumpkin costume. And maybe we are. More likely, we’re just lazy.

Ed did the whole trick-or-treating thing growing up. He has some good memories of it and some bad ones (like the many years he had to dress up like a bunny because his mom made him a nice costume – you can imagine what that might do to a little boy who dressed like an Army man as soon as he was allowed to choose). I did the whole trick-or-treating thing for a few years as a little girl in Tennessee. To strictly call in “Trick-or-treating” might be a bit misleading. We lived on a busy road, so the furthest we went was next door to Mrs. Mayberry’s. After that, we drove over to Grandma’s neighborhood and knocked on the doors of houses whose residents we knew (Mrs. Little, Mrs. Cochran and probably people related to us somehow). You didn’t get very far because trick-or-treating equaled socializing. Many of the houses we stopped at, we were invited inside and stayed for ten or fifteen minutes.  I’m supposing the adults were catching up on all the local gossip.

Our night ended at Kenneth’s. Kenneth is my mom’s “baby” cousin. At the time, he wasn’t married and somewhere in his mid-20s. If he held a job or not then, that’s a history I don’t know. Kenneth, I would learn, is somewhat allergic to work, adulthood and all thing like that. As a kid, though, I just thought it was the best ending to Halloween. (Disclaimer: what my memory tells me and what is actually true may not be the same. I was but 5, 6, 7 and 8 years of age – memories at that age always have a tint of imagination.) Kenneth lived in a little upstairs apartment just off the square. It appeared very spooky to me – up some old steps in a darkened well. His apartment also seemed dark, tiny and sparse but he was a bachelor, after all. I’m pretty sure no kids lived in those few upstairs rooms. And even fewer knocked on narrow doors and climbed dark steps to trick-or-treat at Kenneth’s. And yet…Kenneth always had a box full of neatly packaged goodie-bags full of great treats. (I even remember popcorn balls one year!) And we’d sit down, enjoying our nice treats while mom and Kenneth visited and caught up on the local gossip. Then we also got to take treats home because, really, what was Kenneth going to do with them all? (Except eat them for dinner over the next week…) That’s what you call successful trick-or-treating.

So, will Emry trick-or-treat? I guess we’ll discuss that next year. Or maybe just wait until she’s old enough to ask what the other kids are up to. One thing’s for certain: it won’t be the trick-or-treating I knew!