Hello-ween

Last night was trick-or-treating here (you probably already knew that, huh?) and every single year since my kids got too old to go themselves (or when they hit 6 feet tall, whichever happened first) I have been In Charge of the Handing Out of the Candy. But last night I was in the middle of an intense part of the horror/thriller book I am reading (appropriate for the night, yes?) by Peter Straub called Mr. X. If you're not familiar with Straub, you will perhaps get my drift when I tell you that he and Stephen King co-wrote one or more books. Anyway, I wanted my DH to take over the candy duty. You'd have thought I'd asked him to go buy Tampax. He's all "Me? Me? But you always do it..." to which I replied only with a raised eyebrow. So the hour arrives, and he puts TWO chairs outside on the porch and wheedles me into lending moral support. Like maybe he'll do it WRONG, hand out a gummy bear to a kid with braces, I don't know. He actually stood BEHIND me and reached over me to drop the candy in the sticky little bags. When I pointed this out, he said he was "cold". But one little tyke noticed a difference this year. He looks at the proffered goody, squints suspiciously at the DH and proclaims loudly "SHE always gave us a HANDFUL of candy". I quickly pointed out these were bigger bars, so only one to a customer, and he nodded but looked skeptical. Alas, now our house is no longer rated "prime" in goody status. The shame.

When my kids were small, pre-pre-school, I convinced them that trick or treating was for Big Kids. (Later, when they got older, I planned to tell them it was only for Little Kids and thus avoid the whole deal). This was an easy sell in the beginning, since we lived at the end of a rural lane with no houses in sight and few kids of any age, thus no trick or treaters. Alas, when they began going to the sitter every day, her son let the (black) cat out of the bag by describing all the loot to be had for the asking, and so for several years they made the neighborhood rounds with him. The kid had a system, I'll give him that; all the meandering streets and cul de sacs he had mapped in his head so as to get the maximum number of houses in the 60 minutes allotted. I went with them, but was hopelessly turned around after the first street. My only real contribution to the effort was to tell my kids that if they forgot to say "Thank you" then *I* got the candy. They never forgot, tho it was a near thing a time or two.

Eventually, the sitter's boy, who was short and wiry, continued making the rounds even tho he was 13 or 14, he looked much younger, but my son, at 10 or 11, was closing in on 6 feet tall pretty fast. I told them that many people resent the big kids getting candy that should go to youngsters, and did they really want to go begging, or was it just getting the candy? And they said, Duh? So I said I'd buy the candy and they could save me from the months long quandry of figuring out What I Want To Be This Year, and then making same. That year, a good time was had by all.

And really, this year was OK too, all in all. Sixty seven treaters, the final tally.