Trick or Treat

Halloween has come and gone yet another year. Fortunately for many, the holiday landed on a Friday this year, which lends itself to all sorts of social possibilities: costume parties, fright fest movie marathons, pub crawls, etc.

I haven't decided if I like Halloween yet. The jury has been in deliberation about that now going on 35+ years. After all, sometimes it can be more of a nuisance than anything. Take trick-or-treating for example. I remember growing up on Park View Drive, and in the neighborhood, we had boatloads of kids. I remember we always had a large group of kids and adults that would go house to house, begging for candy. Occasionally I remember getting to the houses that gave the apples, the oranges, the stale old-lady candies (the kind that looked like they were dumped from an old candy dish, out of the wrapper, from some Victorian-esque parlor), the raisins (from the health food family protesting candy-giving), and the peanut chews. NONE of these ever made it to consumption.

And who the hell likes those orange and black wax-paper wrapped candies, or RAISINS for that matter, anyhow....

For me, the nuisance starts with the question, "well what am I going to give out THIS year?" When I first moved into my house, I took to buying full-sized candy bars for the kids. That only happened once. That was the year I had over 130 kids show up at my door. Anyone who's ever bought decent candy knows that this translated to spending a small fortune on kids I don't even know or like.

I then took to buying candy that I thought I would want if I was trick or treating. I like Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and Snickers candy bars. Of course, I didn't want to run out of candy, so I had to buy 7 or 8 large bags just to have enough. The result: it rained, it was cold, and I had 39 kids and about 5 bags of my favorite candy lying around the house as leftovers.

I'm sure my pancreas thanked me for that, as its life-span is probably 30 years shorter as a result.

The next step was just to forget the whole thing, and be occupied somewhere else that evening. Well, this is fine, but when one has nothing with which to occupy himself, it makes one go stir-crazy.

The final, and in my opinion more attractive option: I decided to give cans of flavored soda. Yes, the Faygo 12 packs of orange, grape, fruit punch, strawberry, black cherry, and root beer. I avoided the lemon-lime flavored soda, since I remember that when you were a kid, you only drank lemon-lime soda when you were a) sick, or b) jonesing for a sugared soda at a family reunion where all the good flavored kinds were already taken, and you were relegated to the bottom of the cooler green cans of lemon lime.

At $2.59 a twelver, canned soda certainly looked like it had more bang for the buck. It cost about the same as the bagged candy, and I thought to myself "what the hell....go for it."

The kids loved it...

In fact on about 3 occasions, I overheard the kids excitingly say, "this is a COOL house, he gives cans of soda! We have to remember this place NEXT year!"

Gee, I feel so lucky....

After all, it's so convenient to have to answer the doorbell about 45 times in a two hour time span. My doorbell was starting to make very weird warped bell chime sounds after a while. It was a little amusing.

Well, I think I've found my niche. It's practical. It's economical. And it's viewed as "cool".

And, I'm sure ALL of the parents will love me when their kids are wanting to drink it right away, get jacked up on the sugar, and then not want to go to bed until Easter.

And I smile.