It occurred to me that this Halloween will be the last of its kind. For the past several years there has been a constant question mark about what to do for Halloween. Should we dress up and go to a party? Should we stay home and hand out candy to hapless children brave enough to venture towards our house? Maybe instead we should just scamper off into the darkness and be devils. That's this year. Next year though we will have a built-in reason to celebrate holidays in a different way. Granted the tiny little person we bring with us won't be capable of saying 'Trick or Treat', but I'm hoping that her inevitable cuteness dressed as something easily recognizable and yet vaguely ironic will prompt people to dish out candy with abandon.
Halloween is one of the few American holidays that really attempts to twist reality a bit. It's meant to be fun and feel just a little bit dangerous. For a kid it's a bit like a scary movie coming to life. Dress up as something else and go out in the world and ask for sugar door to door. Who knows if you're going to make it back in one piece or more importantly, who knows how many boxes of raisins you're going to get stuck with. I thought my days of dressing up and asking for candy were behind me, but now there is a chance to make a comeback! As an adult if you dress up and go trick or treating it's very likely that you're going to get yourself arrested or at least not given a full share of candy because everyone knows you have the ability to just go out and buy the candy yourself. As an adult if you dress up and go trick or treating in a combined costume with your child then at the very least you'll be entitled to 25% of said candy earnings throughout the evening in question.
I think the part that will be most interesting to me is trying to see the world through the eyes of someone who doesn't have my level of experience. I don't pretend to understand all the various aspects of this world and probably know only enough to be dangerous. I'm not the smartest guy in the room, but I'm also not the dumbest. That said, I feel like I have a pretty good grasp on some of the basics about what can exist and what can't. A child doesn't know that the goblin attempting to ensnare that hot girl in a bikini (what on Earth are they watching?) isn't real and is based on someone's imagination. The lines of reality and fiction are still being formed. What was a normal street in the morning is now something sinister in the evening because Halloween blurs the lines of reality ever so slightly. Someone changed the rules for one night. Never mind the fact that as parents we constantly try and warn our children about the dangers of strangers. Then on one night we say it's OK to not only interact with strangers, but to go house to house asking people we don't know for candy. It's the only holiday we celebrate where it's expected that you wander through your neighborhood relying on the good nature of your neighbors. The other major holidays are more focused on turning towards the people you already know and celebrating the season. For a child it's probably a strange paradigm that really speaks to the way we as a society has separated ourselves from each other. Or it's about the candy. Yeah it's probably about the candy.
