Nathaniel

Shockey

Read Nathaniel's bio and previous columns here

October 15, 2007

Nate’s Halloween Party: Go Away, Kid, You Bother Me!

I was at a community event this morning assisting my wife with a booth she had set up. We were trying to recruit volunteers to visit the local elderly in their nursing homes.

I was not very good at making conversation with people. At one point I think I referred to the elderly as “old people,” which, the more I think about it, is the kind of detrimental mentality that lands the elderly in lonely, excluded communities to begin with.

But that really has nothing to do with what I wanted to discuss. What arrested my attention much more than the old people we were trying to help was the bowl of candy we provided. It was designed to get kids to come over and drag their parents with them. It’s a sneaky business, volunteering.

As it turned out, swarms of children, unaccompanied by adults, would come over and grab handfuls of candy out of the bowl right in front of me. And they had plastic bags, so as not to be limited by their undersized handfuls. Some of them would rummage through and take out the best pieces, leaving us with a pretty shabby selection and some rather disappointed looks from passersby who probably assumed we were completely out of touch with the “hot” candies right now, which is entirely untrue. It really bothered me, although I was either too stunned or gutless to speak up and say “One piece per rodent, please.” I just sat there in silence, angrily witnessing everything wrong with the world today – kids.

Some people blame the parents. But when you think about it, the fact of the matter is that without parents, we’d have “Lord of the Flies” on our hands. It’d be Armageddon within a week.

The situation reminded me of a time when I was trick-or-treating with a few of my friends. We came upon a relatively unlit house with a big bowl of candy out front. There were three of us, so we did the responsible thing and split the bowl three ways. I can just imagine whoever put the bowl out front – probably a guy in his 70s with a white beard and a walker who knew better than to assume kids like us would limit ourselves to one piece of candy. But chances are his sense of justice was not greater than his habit of falling asleep shortly after the National News at Six.

I’d like to think that all of us were once young and inconsiderate because, at the very least, my friends and I were. And as much as I wanted to hose down the little thieves today with enough water pressure to send them up into the air like geysers, I should be slow to judge because I was once the same way.

I think kids are one of the main reasons I hate Halloween (although the pressure for anyone over the age of nine to wear a costume is probably still at the top of the list). I’m not certain that many of them are actually cute anymore. The truth is that, without the threat of punishment, most kids would take all your candy.

So how do we respond to this irritating and somewhat depressing scenario?

My first inclination would be to do away with Halloween once and for all – a clean break. But any realist knows this is an impossibility, so perhaps the next best option is to place a bowl of delicious, waxy candy outside the front door, hide behind a bush, and jump out wearing the scariest, most hideous, blood-drenched mask/costume you can find and scream at the top of your lungs right before the kid reaches for the bowl. Catch them in the act, I say. If you’re good enough, they’ll remember you the following year and you’ll never have to buy more than one small bag of candy. I think another good idea is to simply refuse to give candy to anyone you suspect of mischief or bad manners, which should be most of them. “None for you, none for you, one for you and none for you. Happy Halloween!”

The point is that, at the very least, I’d never have split a pound of candy with my friends if it weren’t there to begin with. And besides, at my age, I probably shouldn’t have even been out there last year.

I guess some kids just never learn.

© 2007 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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