Why I've Grown to Despise Halloween.

 

The forecast for today’s Halloween is wet and chilly throughout the evening. I am hopeful this keeps the holiday evening traffic down. You see, I have grown to despise the door to door antics that have become Halloween. It’s not that Halloween was better “When I was a kid.” It’s changed dramatically since about 2010.

Our neighborhood is reasonably nice and suburban. I like where I live. I like my neighbors. We actually interact as friends, most of us. As a kid (I grew up near here), and when my child was a kid(he’s 29), I knew nearly all the kids who came to our door, and nearly all the homes where we would trick or treat.

But today, I know none of these children and teens. That’s because so few of them live in the neighborhood. They are driven in from nearby areas to cull the area for Halloween candy. Hundreds of cars descend on our tiny streets. Remember that scene at the end of “Field of Dreams” with the endless string of cars that pull up to the ballfield? Yep, that is our neighborhood. The traffic is a mess; every year several kids get whacked by cars driven by careless parents as the kids on foot try to navigate from home to home. To date, no serious injuries, but that is coming.

I now see parents who walk with their kids (good) with sidearms clearly on their hips (bad). It won’t be long before one kid says to another “Hey, you took that last Butterfinger! That was mine!”

The dads of those kids exchange words. Someone gets shot.

Halloween is no longer a joyful, fun evening. Kids not in costume is the norm. Kids who shove a bag under your nose with no please or thank-you is the norm. It is literally a “Gimme Mine” evening. We do participate, from 6:00 to 7:30, partly because Cath is better about this than me, and partly out of fear of retribution. You see, the day after Halloween, a drive around our subdivision shows you the egged houses and cars and spray-paint on garage doors.

It’s not that I hate Halloween. Costumes and kids ranging about after dark, trailed by moms and dads; it used to be a relatively harmless way to spend one evening each fall. Times have changed.

This is no longer Halloween. It’s a Purge. I would gladly give 5 bags of candy, and encourage all my neighbors to do the same, to our local school for a Halloween party/trunk or treat, so that we no longer have this Purge in our neighborhood.