Halloween Traditions

When I was a kid, or, back in my day, I don't remember the door-to-door trick-or-treating phenomena being moved from a school night to a nearby weekend like they do almost every year nowadays. I remember almost always going to school the next day with an entire cadre of amped classmates, as we discussed why Three Musketeers were better than Butterfingers and how Snickers were better than Mars Bars and why anyone would ever hand out coconut disasters like Mounds and Almond Joy.

I've since grown to appreciate coconut, but I also take it easy on candy. My well documented teeth situation, which is actually not as bad as I was led to believe and am in the middle of getting fixed, have kept me from going wild with candy. My apparent sweet-tooth tends to limit itself to cookies and/or chocolate chips. I tend to avoid the usual colorful suspects. Chocolate does elevate my mood, though.

Another tradition that you come to recognize after you grow out of the candy-acquisition phase and into the alcohol-consumption phase of life is that a better name for Halloween is Slut-oween.

For some reason many women use "Halloween" as an excuse to wear some of the most tasteless, scanty, and whorish outfits available outside of a sex novelty shop. Normal days of the year, maybe outside of Mardi Gras, this attire would be embarrassingly off limits. Halloween--fair game.

Don't take my comments as complaints, per se, as I appreciate body types of all sizes and all levels of scantily-cladness, but that a costume-creation ethos that basically puts the word 'sexy-' in front of another word has become an American tradition probably says something about us.

For me, today, I'm off work and doing something that I used to consider the scariest thing I could think of: I'm going to the dentist.



Oh delicious irony: the American candy-day and I'm to see the dentist.

Corrie carved a pumpkin yesterday, but we'll keep it inside to keep it from getting smashed. She worked for too long, she tells me, to let some angry teenager out stealing kids' gear to have their way with it.



The picture is not so great, but the haunted house in reality looks pretty great. Corrie picked the design that had architectural elements. Isn't that cute?

(I took both pictures on all hallows eve itself, after midnight on 10/31.)

I've never been so big on Halloween, not like, for me, St. Paddy's or Thanksgiving. I think the year-round elementary school we went to had something to do with it. I am a proponent of the year-round elementary--you get lots of mini-brakes. Nine weeks on, three weeks off as a pattern of attendance until the summer, when you get five weeks off. It's not the great big summer I would hear about, but as a kid with no frame of reference it didn't much matter. The 4th of July was always right at the end of our "Summer Break", then we'd be in school for a while, then off in late September and October. Maybe that's when we made our Disneyland trips; weather's nice, everyone's in school...

But in that scheme, Halloween took place early in our second quarter and marked the end of the warm Sacramento "summer" weather. September and October, as I remember, were pretty pleasant, not blasting heat, not really brisk or chilly. Halloween seemed to mark of me, and for the public of consumers in America, the start of the fall/winter holiday season. You don't get days off for Halloween, but for Thanksgiving? And Christmas?

While I'm not really a Halloween person--I don't throw parties or feel compelled to get dressed up (the last time I was in costume was while I was teaching in grad school in 2004)--I don't hate it like some folks I know. Like, my dentist maybe.

Just guessing, anyway.