HALLOWEEN is stupid. It's a strange yearly event when the rules of social behavior are jiggled just enough to totally confuse and terrify children. Halloween’s not
all fun and candyIt seems like it should be fun for kids. After all, they get to dress up in funny costumes and get candy from people they don't even know. But kids learn there's a dark side to Halloween.
Halloweens were terrifying for me when I was a kid mainly because I was convinced I was going to die. All grown-ups talked about was kids dying on Halloween.
You weren't supposed to go up to houses that were not completely lighted because some weirdo might live there who grabs kids and tortures them in his basement. And even if you went to only "good" houses for your treats, the adults pored through your bag of goodies when you got home, looking for horrible things like razor blades in apples and and boxes of Jujube's rigged with explosives that blow off tiny hands.
I sometimes felt like saying, "Look, Dad, this Halloween thing seems a bit risky. I don't feel like playing Russian roulette with a Three Musketeers bar. Think I'll hit the sack early."
I felt like saying it. But I didn't. Because it was the only time we were allowed to gorge ourselves on candy. No kid in his right mind was going to miss that, even if it did mean risking death.
I never saw a razor blade in an apple -- or even heard of someone finding one -- even though it apparently was a nationwide epidemic. I solved the problem by basically not eating apples, period. At first I figured I'd be safe if I laid off apples from May to December. But then I decided the safer route was to skip apples all together. I don't think I touched an apple after age 7.
ONCE my parents had assembled the pile of "safe" candy, the stuff wrapped and sealed so tightly that you needed a flame thrower to get at it, we would hunker down in a corner and consume the whole mess. It was a glorious time, even though we weren't sure if the resulting stomach ache was merely a reaction to ingesting four pounds of sugar or caused by some slow-acting poison someone had slipped into a Milky Way.
You never looked at life in the same way again after you were old enough to truly understand the dangers of Halloween. You learned that there were certain people in the world who hated kids. This was an eye-opener. Until your awakening, you actually thought everyone loved kids. Wasn't it a law?
More frightening was the fact that there were some people who actually wanted to hurt kids. This was just too much to believe. The world was suddenly divided into two groups of people: those who liked kids and those who liked to hurt kids. And the scariest thing was you couldn't tell them apart.
You also learned that there was more going on in your neighborhood than you ever imagined. Only your parents knew which families were all right and which weren't. I remember one family that seemed so normal and yet, when I began to walk up their sidewalk, my father pulled me away. From then on, I wondered if they were kid-killers. I didn't know that my dad was just mad at our neighbor for not returning his lawn mower or something.
And then there was that one dark house on our block. The old lady who lived there had seemed so friendly. But there was the house on Halloween, all dark and forbidding. She must be a kid-hater, we decided. Why else would she deliberately shut off all her lights and not give out candy to little kids on Halloween? How were we to know that she spent Halloween in her grandkid's neighborhood so she could see them in their costumes and meet their little friends?