What a great Halloween Hubbub last night!
Like other gentrifying neighborhoods, on trick-or-treat night the the ‘hood attracts families from the surrounding down-at-the-heels apartments and decrepit single-family tracts. Parents sense the area is safer for the kids, and they know the residents will hand out better candies and treats less likely to be laced with meth or razor blades. So they bring their costumed babes in by the truckload
They are SO cute!
The favorite costumes this year seem to be ninjas and (oddly) Dorothy of the Wizard of Oz. And princesses. Princesses are big. 😀
One little girl showed up in a historically perfect flapper dress, turquoise with swinging layers of fringes. It was VERY pretty and amazingly cute. Really, unless her mom made it (which would’ve taken half the year!), I can’t even imagine what the parents must have paid for it. Now if she’ll just not grow much for the next eight or ten years, she can wear it to the senior prom!
The neighbors here like to bring a table and chairs out front to greet the little spooks and fashion plates. I spent the evening across the street with the Accountants. Mr. Accountant brings out a portable firepit, the kind with a screen and lid on it, and lights up a Coleman lantern inside it. It puts out a little heat, but not enough to catch fire to any costumes.
You never SAW so many little kids in your life! They were all well-behaved, and their costumes were grand. Often the ones that were obviously home-made were the best: one little girl had on a simple sheet cut and stitched so it would flow diaphanously. It didn’t cover her head — it was more like a white, GHOSTLY floor-length tunic. It was neat.
The Accountants had made a Costco run and bought 150 candies. These ran out by 7 p.m. Since no one pays in cash anymore, we didn’t have pennies or nickels or dimes to hand out. So that kinda shut us down. Next year we’ll have to get more loot.
One nice thing about having everyone sitting out in front of their houses — besides the opportunity to socialize — is that it cuts way, WAY down on the vandalism. People are a lot less likely to smash your pumpkins, tear up your plants, or egg your cars if they think they can be seen. Plus I think it’s a lot more fun to sit outside and watch the kids frolicking around than it is to have to get up and traipse to the door every five minutes.
Halloween has gotten to be my favorite holiday. I really used to dislike it — the whole trick-or-treat meme strikes me as kind of extortionate, and I resent having to buy candy whose leftovers I’ll never eat and that I feel ethically opposed to donating to the poor. However, the idea of sitting outside to join the party changes things altogether. Instead of a nuisance, lately Halloween has become one big party.
When I was a little kid, I used to adore Halloween. My mother put the eefus on that, though. One Halloween, when I was all ready to go and amazingly excited (I was kind of an Aspergery little kid and didn’t make friends, so had a pretty isolated, boring life), my mother got mad at me for some minor thing — I don’t even remember what it was and probably didn’t understand what her problem was then. To get back at me, she announced that I would not be allowed to go trick-or-treating.
That was so upsetting that I never liked Halloween after that. I think I went out the following year, didn’t have a very good time, and then after that just stayed in my room.
So that’s probably part of the reason that as an adult I disliked having hordes of kids show up at my door demanding treats…or else.
However, now that Halloween is an old-folks’ party, it has a whole new appeal! 🙂
I love Halloween, always have. I’d love to be able to hand out candy, but living in an apartment building nixes that. Also, the past three Octobers have not been much fun because something has always happened to stress me out so much that I have been too distracted to really get into the holiday.
I also had a boring childhood because of social isolation/parents’ divorce/lack of money. Mom had very few friends/acquaintances and she sure as hell did NOT want to spend money on other people’s kids. So Halloween and Christmas were the high points of my year. (She never did much for my birthdays.) As unpleasant as mom could be at times, she never would have forbid my trick-or-treating. Thank goodness, I think I would have lost my mind.
I just this morning read of an organization you can donate your leftover candy to and they send it to our troops on duty away from home. If I had known about that earlier I wouldn’t have been afraid of buying too much candy! It’s always a fine line between too little and too much… I worry about that every Halloween. We enjoyed all the kids this year. The older I get, the cuter I find other people’s kids. We also saw some amazing costumes. The weather was mild enough that you could see the costumes – they didn’t need to wear their coats.