A HALLOWE’EN POST...MORTEM

Monday night, She Who Must Be Obeyed and I were kept hopping by the 170 or so Trick-or-Treaters that roamed our neighborhood.

Plenty of cute little tykes, many of them so young as to be totally slack-jawed with wonder and cluelessness at the proceedings. I like it when the parents coach these little ones:

“What do you say?”

“Twickatweet...”

“Good!”

I especially like it when they remind the kids to say “thank you.” Conversely, I fucking hate it when kids who are Old Enough To Know Better mash the doorbell repeatedly, stand mutely at the door with sack outstretched, then waltz away without some basic Statement of Gratitude. And SWMBO? That kind of crap makes her blood boil...must be the teacher in her.

[SWMBO spends her whole day with middle-school kids, so Hallowe’en is her least-favorite holiday, what with having to deal with Yet More Kids all evening. As if that were not bad enough, she cannot eat any of the candy, thanks to her diabetes. Crap.]

We handed out Airheads. We had bought two honkin’ big sacks of Airhead miniatures at CostCo last month and proceeded to mislay them...fortunately (and yet, stupidly) we still had a couple of cartons of full-size Airheads left over from last year. Turns out we had just enough.

The beauty of Airheads is that the kids love ’em...and I hate ’em. Or at least, I’m not tempted to eat them, as I would be if we had them little Hershey Miniatures around. Fat-Ass in a Bag, they are.

To me, proper Hallowe’en observance requires that The Forms Be Obeyed. You must speak the Ritual Invocation: Trick or Treat. (Adding “Smell my feet, give me something good to eat” is lily-gilding.) And you must, upon receiving the Candiferous Swag, express appropriate gratitude: Thank You. And - this is important! - you must be Properly Costumed. If you are too fucking lazy to put on a costume, and especially if you are old enough to shave, you should be home watching porn and eating Chee-tos, not roaming the neighborhood clutching a pillowcase begging for Simple Carbohydrates.

Shaving cream applied to one’s posterior does not qualify as a proper costume.

Collecting for UNICEF? Get off my front steps and away from my house. [Fortunately, not a problem this year.]

Those who do not conduct themselves properly receive a flattened and scored Human Turd, cleverly wrapped to resemble a Hershey Bar.