Thursday, November 01, 2012

Denying my kid chocolate is where I draw the line....

Last year, our town postponed Halloween amid the ruins that came about from the freak October nor'easter. It was originally postponed until a few days later then again postponed and turned into a "trunk or treat" where cars parked in the high school parking lot and the kids went from car to car to collect candy. Personally, I think that's kind of lame, but I went along with it because it made sense to not have kids trick-or-treating in neighborhoods that still didn't have power or were still unsafe because of the trees that were knocked down.

But this year? This year, I was a rebel. When the town decided to postpone Halloween to Saturday, I fought back. I refused to be held down by the restrictions of society. I looked "the man" in the eye and said, "no!" And then we broke all the rules and went trick-or-treating anyway.

Ok, I'm sure many of you have taken up pet causes that are a lot more worthy than Halloween, but I was looking forward to giving FunnyKid the experience and Saturday doesn't work for us. And our neighborhood has power and no downed trees so no one's safety was at risk.

We had friends over to go with us and I was bound and determined to give the kids a Halloween. My back-up plans included taking them over the town line to a neighborhood with an officially-sanctioned Halloween and having the kids parade around our house and collect candy from adults in different rooms.

Luckily, our neighborhood is full of rebels just like us and they turned their lights on. So we took our St. Bernard, our Tinkerbell(s) and our Peter Pan to about seven houses, made them walk the darkened streets and stuffed winter coats under their costumes-- just how Halloween is meant to be.

And now that everyone is begging for candy for breakfast, my work here is done. But if anyone tries to mess with Thanksgiving, I can promise I'll be leading the charge to keep the government out of our good time.

2 comments:

sarah said...

Heh. You and I are the exact opposite; my neighborhood did NOT have power last night (except for us! yay corner house!) and I assumed (wrongly, as it turns out) that people would listen, so no trick-or-treating here. (Heck, even if the neighborhood DID band together and decide to do it last night, we didn't have anything to hand out since I was waiting for Saturday as instructed.) We went to Grandma's house in Bristol (which we were going to do anyway) and to her next-door neighbors, and i guess that will be it for this year, since everyone else has already done it. Good thing my kid's not old enough to be shunned because his mother is a rule-follower.

Anonymous said...

I... what is this tomfoolery?

Hallowe'en is on 31 October. This is an uncontrovertable fact. No government can change this.

This is even true in (Old) England, where we favour Guy Fawkes Night to Hallowe'en, as it is more wholesome (cf burning a revolutionary in effigy).

What is the US up to now? I had become momentarily distracted by your election and must have missed this.