An Unsolicited Rant on a Pet Peeve

In this day and age when one of the number one adult complaints is that kids are on their cell phone or computer all the time, what’s the deal with teaching them that getting the maximum amount of candy with the minimum amount of interaction is a good deal?

Yes, I speak of Trunk or Treat, Satan’s plan to take out possibly the only redeeming quality of a day devoted to skeletons and witches: time spent going to the neighbors with your parents in the dark in one of the best seasons of the year.

Honestly, I feel like our neighborhood is as full of drug dealers and pedophiles as any in America (with the possible exception of everywhere else in America), and I am as confident as anyone that death lurks at every corner. But when I read about kids in New York and Chicago who get to go Trick or Treating, I get jealous. My friends in Denver and LA are walking their kids up and down their block teaching them that their neighbors are ordinary people, not treacherous goblins that need to be avoided, but our kids are huddled together in church parking lots or trundling up and down Main holding out plastic pumpkins like chocolate junkies.

I promise you that when other old people send me cartoons of cottages in snowy fields with, oddly, streetlights in front of them that do cartoon twinkling, telling me about how great 1952 was, I delete them like they were porn.

I don’t think 1952 was great. My mother wouldn’t buy us a toaster because she didn’t want us to be spoiled, and there were two shows on TV and the picture was the size of a small cavity. Everybody was worried about dying from cancer or that Russia would explode an atom bomb and we’d die horrible mutant deaths. Nobody talked about anything so little kids had to worry all the time about stuff they didn’t understand.

But one thing about 1952 was great: kids walked around the block with their parents (or if they were single moms, which I’ve been, you turned out the lights and everyone thought you were cheap. Yet another price to pay for being single.)

You scuffed through the leaves in the dark, and your parents stood back at the curb like bored elephants at the zoo, swaying back and forth. You talked to people and you went up and down your street first because people would feel bad if you left them out.

Grown-ups had to pop up every ten seconds to answer the door and hold the dog so it wouldn’t bite anyone’s nose off.

But did we not know that labor was not the first pain in the back end our kids were going to be? What about being teaching them to be a good neighbor and learning not to be greedy?

Isn’t a little inconvenience a small price to pay for being able to buy large bags of individually wrapped Twix bars without anyone looking at your hips and thinking, “Gosh, doesn’t she know what causes that?”