All Hallows Eve

The house is strangely quiet. No one knocks on my door asking for treats. No pumpkins flicker yellow candlelight outside my house. No bowl of candy sits by the front door. Drew has deserted me. He is off helping the coach take his daughter around their neighborhood for treats (and hoping to snag some for himself). For the first time in decades I am free and clear of Halloween. Sugar and I settle in for an evening of reading.

I think about past years. When I was a kid, I took great delight in Halloween. How exciting to dream up and create a costume and be something you normally aren't! We lived in a small town, and my sisters and I went all over town collecting bags full of big candy bars and home made popcorn balls. We dragged our loot home numerous times so our bags wouldn't look too full. People often tossed 2 or 3 bars in our bags at once. Sometimes they would ask who we were, and if they knew us, we got the special stuff. For kids who seldom had chocolate treats, we were in heaven. Mom made us freeze the majority of our take and doled it out in our lunches over the course of the school year.

Dad sometimes created a haunted house in the church, of all places! That was before celebrating ghosts and witches came into scrutiny by church leaders who rightly called a halt to such stuff. Dad would peel grapes and put them in paper lunch bags, then have people feel them without looking and tell them they were peeled eyeballs. Or put cooked oatmeal in a container and tell us it was someone's brains. I'm amazed he got away with such stuff, being a pastor and all. But it drew big crowds of kids who normally didn't attend church. The haunted house always ended up in the church basement where Dad told scary stories and rattled chains and had displays of beheadings and such stuff.

When my boys were little, there was a huge push against church participation in Halloween. My kids attended church parties where everyone dressed as Bible characters and played games and we knew the candy being handed out was safe and not laced with razor blades or poison like happened in the 1960s. Still, it's a far cry from the old All Saints Eve, the time when people gathered in churches for protection because they mistakenly thought that souls who had died got one last chance to take vengeance on their enemies before going to their eternal reward.

All last week I heard people complaining about how kids from the city are bused to their neighborhoods for the free candy and how rowdy and rude all these strange kids are. Many of the neighborhoods have agreed to turn their lights off at 7 pm and ignore any knocks on the door. That way they give to the kids in their neighborhood who are little enough to be happy about getting a few treats, and don't have to go broke serving the entire city population.

Another friend talked about having bridge duty. On Halloween numerous volunteers work with the police department guarding bridges because pranksters throw big pumpkins over bridges onto the cars driving beneath. Seems they catch a lot. They work in groups of two and have walkie talkies to call the police as soon as they spot someone. Dangerous work as you never know when someone will pull a knife or a gun. Something is wrong with this picture. I've heard of many caveats about Halloween, but this seems over the edge.

This year I got a picture of my grand daughters in costume - big bird and a princess. They didn't go too many places since my son distrusts the loot and doesn't want to risk them getting something they ought not to get. What a confusing holiday! Maybe we should just come up with something safe and fun to do at home for the night.