Last night was Halloween. For those of you unfamiliar with
the holiday it’s a beautiful time of year where small children are encouraged
to pretend to be someone else and come to the homes of strangers and ask for
candy.

Ironically the other 364 days of the year we spend telling
children NOT to take candy from strangers, especially ones that have a corpse
or bloody appendages on their front porch.

Hey it’s never too early to prepare kids for the phenomenon
of mixed messages and confusion to all things adult as we usher them into their
puberty. It was a bitter sweet night for the wife and I as for the first time
in 14 years we had neither our son or 10 yr old daughter to walk the blocks
with as they collected enough goodies to keep dentists in business for years to
come.

(On a side note they say the Celts invented Halloween and
after a little research I found out the “Celt” is an ancient Gallic word
meaning ” cavity creators”.)

Our kids were with friends this time and so we sat on the
porch and waited for the kids to come up and seek to reap their reward. As much
as the missus and I don’t have in a lot in common generally in this one thing
we were united; No one got even one
tootsie roll without uttering the magic phrase, “Trick or Treat”.

Many kids would come up to us not saying a word and simply
open their bags as though we were obligated to give them their desires. It’s
like the holiday version of teaching kids that entitlements are part of being
American.

It’s bad enough that the holiday implied that if you don’t
give us candy there will be hell to pay, but now these narcissists believe even
following through with the ritual of saying 3 words is too much to ask.

As they stood there we would ask “what do you have to say”
and normally the response was …”uhhh, please?..no thank you?…even a couple
“happy Halloween!”

It took them a few moments to get it and normally I would
start it with a ” tri..tri…trick…?” like I was trying to coax something legible
from someone who had suffered a brain trauma and was only now realizing they
weren’t Scandinavian.

Eventually they would say “Trick or treat” and we would feel
like we had actually contributed something beautiful to society by keeping not
only tradition alive, but also common courtesy. My next assignment is to try to
get their parents to use their turn signals. A much more difficult task and one
where perhaps a rotting corpse or a dancing skeleton may actually come in
handy!