Goodbye, Halloween

When I was a kid, Halloween was the best day of the year. Christmas was for children. Halloween was for awesome. There was the year when that one guy dressed up in a gorilla suit and scared all the neighborhood trick-or-treaters. Or the year I carved the word "DONATE" into my pumpkin and made four bucks in change. Or the year I scored a full pillowcase of candy then topped off the night by watching Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds with my family.

Fast-forward fifteen years. I'm still afraid of birds. It's not even nine o' clock and I'm the last person awake. The rain and wind are continuing in torrential fashion, much like they have been all day, thus preventing anyone from going trick-or-treating. Some frosted pumpkin-shaped sugar cookies are growing stale on the counter, the result of an attempt to do something pumpkin-esque in the wake of there being no actual pumpkins left in town to carve up in true Halloween fashion. The only attempt at getting decked out in a costume that I saw today was the bus driver wearing some devil horns. And she's super mean anyway, so that hardly counts.

But you know what really killed Halloween? The trunk-or-treat. Even if it wasn't hurricaning outside tonight, it is doubtful that the volume of trick-or-treaters would be enough to put a dent in the bowl of assorted Tootsie Rolls we had waiting for them––thanks to the trunk-or-treat. At least now I get to eat all those delicious vanilla-flavored ones myself. The advent of the trunk-or-treat has put traditional Halloween door-to-door madness in serious jeopardy. Where is the adventure in trunk-or-treating? Kids finish up with that charade in about six minutes. Then what? A kid can only do so many laps around a church parking lot before the candy-givers get suspicious. Why the trunk-or-treat? Are parents afraid of their kids getting kidnapped during Orthodox trick-or-treating? As a kid, the thrill of possibly being kidnapped was half the fun! And let's be serious: If I were a kidnapper, the most obvious place to hide a body is in my trunk. No one thought of that, did they.

Halloween used to be about hoarding candy and dressing up like a Power Ranger all day. It used to be about building gory haunted houses and letting the inner sadist run wild. It used to be about trick-or-treating amok with your cadre of buddies who knew which places in town gave out the soda pops and king-size candy bars. Halloween used to be magical. And now it's about trunk-or-treats and frosting sugar cookies and watching the spooky episode of Thomas & Friends. Maybe next year I will be sure to buy a pumpkin before the night before Halloween. Then I won't be so bitter.

The Alarm Clock

Alarm clocks are evil. Fact. I dare you to find someone who enjoys his or her alarm clock. I'm not talking about setting an alarm on your phone to play the smooth sounds of Enya to rouse you in the morning. (Though I did used to have my stereo set to play Pirates of the Caribbean music to wake me in the mornings, which made me leap enthusiastically out of bed with the determination to pirate and pillage the world.)  I'm talking about hardcore, old-school, ear-shattering alarm clocks. The kind that send you into minor cardiac arrest. Every single time. Do people even use those anymore? I do. It's unfortunate. Neither my alarm clock nor I benefit from our relationship. My alarm clock has been hurled against the wall so many times I'm amazed it still works. (Actually it stopped working once and for old times' sake I hurled it against the wall, then it magically started working again. Yeay.) And my heart has been racing so many times because of that infernal beeping that I have become slightly neurotic. And jumpy.

What does my alarm clock sound like? Terrible. It sounds terrible. Think of the worst sound you can possibly fathom. In Hell. Now times it by ten and smother it in celery. There is only one alarm clock that sounds worse: my little brother's. His is truly old-school. It's a gold-colored wind-up clock with a ringing bell alarm. The kind you see in Little House on the Prairie and think to yourself, "Man, I'm so glad I didn't have to live back then." Luckily for my brother, he never could hear his alarm clock. He slept like a tranquilized bear. I, however, having created a life for myself of neurotic jumpiness, could hear his alarm clock go off from clear across the house. Complete with minor cardiac arrest. My parents knew my brother slept like a rock (he often slept through the smoke detector false-alarming, so we're lucky he is still with us), and they knew I was instantly aroused from sleep by the slightest noise, so since they very intentionally gave that alarm clock to my brother, I'm pretty sure they hated me.

Now I have kids, and they have become my alarm clock. The other morning my 4-month-old baby started shrieking which caused the cardiac arrest which made me hurl her against the wall. No I didn't. But I did cry a little. I was so terrified.

When I am king of the world, there will be no more alarm clocks. People will just sleep as long as they like. If they insist on having some way of being woken up, too bad. The world tried that alarm clock thing for far too long. Do you know when the alarm clock became a mainstream household item? The same year World War I started. That cannot be coincidence.