We just got back from our friend's house, who had invited us over to give out candy to the neighborhood kids as a low key Halloween celebration. Little did I realize that her neighborhood is amazingly popular with local families from elsewhere.
This became quite apparent as we pulled onto the first of a couple roads that lead to her house, and encountered lines and lines of parked cars on either side of the roadway as if every house on the block were hosting a party. We coasted through the neighborhood as the trick-or-treaters were in full swing.
There were so many little kids and their adult companions strolling the sidewalks and crisscrossing the street that it demanded almost constant pressure on the clutch to keep from stalling out. Either that or I could have run over some kid with an ugly costume, but that just wouldn't have been kosher.
The whole process of giving out candy was quite an interesting one this time around, given our friend prefers to forego the trick or treat method for her own trick for treat method. As a trade for the candy, depending on the general age of the kid it involves any number of things such as singing songs, delivering tongue twisters, or doing dances, etc.
When she first mentioned this bartering mode she uses, I kept my displeasure to myself. It just brought back a lot of the negative things about childhood, and how much of it had to do with adults wanting kids to do things, be they chores or homework or Sunday school or what else.
What really got me was how much most of the kids, of which there were a whole freakin' lot of 'em, really got into this exercise of tit for tat. There were a lot of untapped creative personalities in several of them, and some genuinely discouraging blank stares on a great many others.
Many of the kids whose parents didn't wait at the sidewalk would get impatient while waiting for other people's kids who were in the midst of "performing", and lead their kid on to an easier to exploit house. That's the thing I recall most about giving out candy. Quickly open the door, give the beggars some stash, shut the door, and go back to whatever you were doing. As a kid, there was always this assumption that you say those three words, and suddenly the elderly grandmother on the other side of the screen door would just OOH and AHH and that was that.
My friend seems to get this thrill from energizing the kids to think on their feet, and to think with new parts of their brains, and that sort of thing. Strange it may be that giving them all of that candy is just gonna fuck it all up. That's what I was busy doing most of the time myself.
I sat back a couple feet from the wide open door, watching the goings-on, knocking back that smack for kids: smarties. I remember spending a lot of time, as a kid, very meticulously shuffling through the 7-11 buying loads of candy with my lunch money. I guess you know you've gotten old when that sort of thing is just a passing fancy, or a faded memory.
Although I'm still not set on this method of making kids into child stars, it was nice to see the array of them on a more personal level. The brief interactions made many of them a bit more memorable. The old standbys of princesses and witches are still in heavy rotation for girls, as are pirates and ninjas for boys.
I stopped trick or treating in elementary school, but I know a lot of people who continued on through high school. Most of the oldest kids that passed through were in middle school, though. That's the age of the kid with my favorite costume, and the one that really caught me off-guard: Frank, the bunny, from "Donnie Darko"! There was also a Corpse Bride, a couple Darth Vaders, a lot of demons, and a couple of self-proclaimed whores.
Yes, whores (ranging in age from 10 to 14). I guess one could say that this all speaks loudly about our culture, but I resist putting some umbrella statement across these isolated incidents. It's intriguing nonetheless.
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