CANDY! CANDY! CANDY!
Hope everyone had a suitably sugar coated Halloween this year. (I'm not saying I refused to part with several of the Milky Ways... I'm just saying.) Things I like about Halloween: Small children dressed as chickens. Things I dislike about Halloween: twelve-year-olds dressed like whores.
Man, kids in NYC clean up on Halloween. Unlike the 'burbs, there are no malls in which to dump the kids (when did that stupid trend develop? It can't be fear - that whole "razor blades in the candy" terror was proven to be a big bunch of b.s.) so kids actually get to go door-to-door. (Or in the case of our building, apartment-to-apartment. And seeing as how there are roughly 690 apartments in each building... How do you spell "sugar high"?) I was on the tony Upper East Side for part of this year's festivities. Say what you will about the rich, but those folks know what's what when it comes to decor. Six story brownstones decorated with gigantic inflatable spiders with full-sized human skeletons scaling the walls! Fog machines! Specially rented lights! Plus, all the businesses give out candy! Seriously, I don't know how kids carry it all.
Still, nothing competes with Topeka in the 70's for Halloween hijinks. Dad would throw me in the car and take me to our version of the Upper East - a neighborhood of old victorian homes dubbed "Potwin", which has to be the worst name for a fancy community ever. You got the best candy there (full-sized bars!) but there was one house that went all out: cauldrons of caramel on the front lawn with apples for dipping or a (highly-monitored) bonfire for marshmallow roasting along with an elaborate haunted house made out of cardboard boxes (which someone's father might have spent a little too much time in for his small daughter's comfort. I'm not saying someone pitched a fit on the lawn, convinced that the boxes had eaten her father - I'm just saying). The mother would dress up like a witch and stand on her widow's walk cacking into a megaphone, scaring everyone half to death. It was so, so cool. I defy anyone to tell me that hauling a kid to a mall is awesomer than that.
posted by Ali @ 9:32 AM
3 Comments:
This year some guy in that neighborhood carved over a hundred pumpkins and was planning on 700 trick or treaters. 700. If we had that many we would be forced to give out A candy corn to each one. 700.
The newest trend in Kansas is Halloween "tail-trunking" (a take-off on tail-gating). People pull their cars into church (etc.) parking lots, pop the trunks to expose elaborately decorated interiors, and the kids go from trunk to trunk. Jeez! Back in the olden days, we used to walk for miles (really!) on dark country roads carrying grocery sacks (the big, brown, paper kind) from door to door. And believe me, the "doors" were quite a distant apart. It was scary as hell and SO much fun. Ahhh, the good ole days.
I grew up in the country, so all the kids in a several-mile radius would show up at my house, where we all loaded into a hay-filled flatbed trailer and were toted via tractor from house to house. It was very cool. Of course, I'm not sure how the adults felt about getting every kid in a several-mile radius at there house at once, but we loved it...
Post a Comment
<< Home