When I was growing up, I would roll my eyes at adults who told us how things were when they were kids.
But here I am, all grown up, mostly, and I’ve got a gripe. Let the eye rolling commence.
A letter to the editor appeared in the Press Gazette last week from a woman who lives in Hawk’s Nest subdivision. She was upset by the poor treatment she and her husband received after they ran out of candy, referring to the kids being bussed into her neighborhood for trick-or-treating.
Yeah. What about that?
I have never seen such a thing until a couple of years ago, it happened in our neighborhood. We were out with our little ones, dutifully taking them door to door when a barrage of unfamiliar children – a lot of them older than our little goblins – nearly ran over our kids to get to the front doors ahead of them. I turned around to see a trailer set up like a hayride with about 20 children. The truck and trailer would go ahead of the kids about twenty feet then the kids would hit all the houses between the drop-off and pick-up point.
It was all very mechanical and took some of the fun out of it for me.
When I was a child, we would dress up and go to our neighbors’ houses to trick-or-treat and they knew us. They would take time to guess who we were because we were actually their neighbor.
It was fun and personal.
Trick-or-treating in years past were not always as fun for my own children. One year I had to work on Halloween and my mother took my two oldest boys out. A teenager on a skateboard whizzed by and grabbed my oldest son’s bag of candy. I think he was about eight or nine at the time. That was heart-breaking.
Another time more recently, my youngest daughter got terribly ill on Halloween night before trick-or-treating even began. She was vomiting in her Supergirl costume. She curled up on the living room sofa and fell asleep with a high fever. We ended up at the emergency room that night. Her grandmother bought a couple of bags of candy for her and mixed them up and gave them to her the next day. She was happy, but it was not the same.
Halloween has a special feel and to me, that is ruined by families who drive their kids to the more well-to-do neighborhoods to trick-or-treat. The lady from Hawk’s Nest said her $100 worth of candy was gone by 7:15. That is ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous.
What are kids learning by that? The treat is not special when it’s turned into an assembly line, knocking on doors of people you don’t know and likely won’t see again to grab a handful of candy and run to the next house. First of all, NO ONE needs that much candy. The parents are going to eat most of it anyway.
To whoever egged that ladies’ house, what goes around comes around. Truer words have never been spoken.
Karma baby, Karma.
Published Nov. 19, 2013
This article originally appeared on Santa Rosa Press Gazette: Woman on the Edge: Karma, baby, Karma