So we had the Halloween parties all afternoon on Friday, the kids went trick or treating on Sunday and now I hear some neighborhoods are doing it again on Thursday evening? Do we think kids aren’t enjoying their childhoods or something? This gets to be expensive for people. That’s why I just walk the dogs between five and seven. I must say I wasn’t the only one gone Sunday, either. Home Depot was full of people with no Packer game to watch, passing off Halloween on someone else in the family and I‘ve never seen so many people walking behind their usually homebound family dogs at the dog park. I understand. It’s not that much fun to sit at the front door waiting for kids who you’ve never seen before, who are standing with their uncomfortable parents or weirder yet, were driven over to your neighborhood and dropped off at the corner. Poor Lake Drive. I know lots of our future who tell me they go there because they get big candy bars.
I saw about four teenage guys sitting at the bus stop with their bags of candy and very lame costumes. They were going through all the free stuff they managed to scare people into giving them. Who is going to tell four fourteen year olds, they don’t get candy? Kids are huge these days. They might come back and take revenge.
I was thinking of using my old tactic of putting an empty candy bowl on the front porch with a cute sign that asked the children to “Take just one, please”. Then I thought of giving out everything I plan to take to Goodwill, or put a used book in everyone’s bag and watch the smile disappear. One of my students told me that last year I said I was going to give out toothbrushes. This year I just crossed a big ladder over my front steps. I’ll bet no one even looked to see if I had fallen off it and was lying dead in a basket of the neighbor’s mini Hershey bars.
Let’s all put a fork in trick or treating and if we must, do it at different times throughout the year on dates known only to the people in the neighborhood. If word gets out early, the day is automatically changed to the next day. If football size boys come to the door and they can’t tell you the name of a sixth grade teacher at Lake Bluff or Atwater well then sorry, Buster. Give them some aftershave and send them on their way.
When something is so hopelessly broken don’t bother trying to fix it. Hit it over and over again with a sledgehammer until you kill it. Only then, can we truly start all over; that is if we want to.
August is available…
