Horrors of Halloween

I don’t know about you, but I hate Halloween. The holiday is a time of “merriment,” claim its proponents. They say that Halloween is “fun for kids,” and they bring their grubby little children around to every house in the neighborhood, descending upon us like a swarm of locust.

Every year I do my best to be civil to those little masked vultures, but to no avail. Last year, I even spent three hours cutting up celery sticks into kid-sized pieces and wrapping them in a fun colored plastic, but they would have none of it. They came back the next day and egged my house. (Surely, Halloween must instill in its participation a hatred of healthy treats and good neighbors).

I do understand the allure, however. Dear reader, I even celebrated that wretched day once upon a time. Let me explain a little bit about this topic. It only takes three Halloweens in a row, the older kids from my school stealing my candy, the bike I was using to get around town and ripping my favorite Genie from Aladdin costume to realize that Halloween is not for you. Low and behold, however, the evils of Halloween eventually drew me back in.

What is worse is how expensive everything is, especially the candy. Some would argue that it is quite the opposite and that candy is actually on sale because they know you will be able to sell it in bulk, but that is exactly the problem. (When they make it $3 for a five-pound bag, how can I be expected to not buy 57 bags on the first of the month and run out the week before Halloween?) Maybe if that had not happened, I would not have had to spend so much time cutting up the stupid celery.

What is worse, still, as Sean Hannity once pointed out, trick-or-treating is really just training children for a life of relying on the government to sustain them. They go around to each house, demanding free handouts.

I never had such luxuries as a child. I never got anything, not even from my own parents. (Noted child psychologist Alfred Yankovic summed up my childhood perfectly in his seminal work “When I Was Your Age” “We were hungry, broke and miserable and we liked it fine that way. There were 73 of us living in a cardboard box. All I got for Christmas (more on that holiday next time) was a lousy bag of rocks. Every night for dinner we had a big old chunk of dirt. If we were really good we did not get dessert.”)

Truer words have never been spoken. So I admonish you, dear reader, to not participate in Halloween. It will drain your pocketbook and cause you to wake up sweating from nightmares you once experienced, just as I did. I would type more, but I feel faint and my blood sugar is a little low. Time to self-medicate with more candy corn.