It's tough these days, especially when you are old enough to remember door-to-door trick or treating in a neighborhood where you trusted every adult and your parents knew their families for a couple generations back - that's so seldom the case anymore.
We stopped at a couple of neighbors' houses and visited two elderly cousins, but otherwise opted to take the kids to the mega-dorm of the local state university campus. The students there do an incredible Halloween bash, free to all the community's children. It's complete with games (that the collegians are themselves too young to remember as traditional) like bobbing for apples, while blind-folded with hands behind one's back. Trooping from floor to floor, thru the scarily-garishly-beautifully decorated halls, knocking on the many, many doors labeled "Halloween Safe Zone", to be greeted by adult children - themselves dressed as clowns, cowpokes, witches, zombies, princesses, etc., the two little ones were alternately delighted, horrified, giggling, and screaming. The "haunted house" was not quite as good as it was a year ago to my mind - but the collegians tried mightily and Caelin was impressed (Conor demurs when one gets to that point, ceding foolhardiness masquerading as bravery to his little sister).
It has its definite advantages - weather is not a consideration, there are no barking dogs, one need not fear those who don't know enough to drive carefully or soberly when the streets are full of youngsters. And, of course, it relieves the constant concerns about what might find its way into the bag of treats. Too, it gives me great hope for tomorrow because I am hard-pressed to believe that these several hundred 18-21 year olds - who choose to give up hours of their own perfect-for-partying Halloween to obviously delight little ones - won't represent a positive factor in the future of my community, my state, my nation, my world.
A pair of burly football-player sized guys, black and white, garbed as a prince and a zombie, one struggling to delicately tie strings around sugar doughnuts with fingers the thickness of kielbasa, while the other hunkers down to be eye-to-eye with a 3-year-old and tell her with absolute sincerity that she's the most beyootiful princess that he's ever met, give me great hope for the humanity of our oft-maligned young adults.
I miss the door-to-door, especially the delighted older couples who ooh and ahh as if they've never before seen Darth Vader or a beyootiful princess, but not the jostling by crowds of over-sized "kids" who are content to take the night from the little ones, or the wholesale invasions by carloads of those neighborhood-hopping to get the "good stuff". It's not the same and life moves on - neither my now-adult children nor their miniature siblings have ever known Halloween in quite the mode that I remember, but they have all experienced it as safe and scary and fun and I guess that is what counts the most.
Many years,
Neil, anxiously awaiting the observance of Old Calendar Halloween with Andrew and planning to help Al sort the candy to assure that it's received by the most needy (Al, don't you dare touch the M&Ms before I get there, I need to test them for quality
)
Or too cheap? :rolleyes:
