You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
Going dark on Halloween.
This year I was the house with the lights turned off. I was the home not handing out Halloween Candy. Yes I was that house!
This year, for the 1st time in a long time, I was the house that trick or treaters would stare at with candyless contempt.
It’s 6:45 Monday night. I turn off the main drag into my well maintained sub-division.
It’s the bewitching hour and I feel a lump in my throat. I suddenly remember I have no Trick or Treat candy.
I didn’t buy one single piece. Not a Mars Bar. Not a 3 Musketeers. Not a nuclear proof Twinkie. I got nothing but cobwebs and sadness in my candy pantry.
Oh man, I hope they don’t see me pull in, I think to myself as I pass an undulating mass of elementary age candy beggars.
I slow to a crawl, knowing that a child amped up on sugar and nougat is just as likely to throw themselves in front of my car as a rabid skunk is to lift its tale and spray funk across the moonlit sky.
As I turn the corner, I see the silhouette of tiny ghosts and goblins moving down the sidewalk.
“Stay on the sidewalk, baby Cinderella,” I say to myself.
I eyeball a suspicious looking storm trooper as I put on my blinker to enter my driveway. The mini star wars action figure has a shopping bag weighted down with hollow calories of a previous Trick or Treat expedition.
From the size of his candy sack, it appears that my neighbors are doing their part, giving big, delicious bars of tooth decaying ecstasy.
I pull into my driveway. I see a dozen kids coming down the sidewalk. They are carrying pillow cases and plastic pumpkins. They are ringing doorbells and rushing across lawns. They are like wild dogs, fueled on creamy delicious goo.
I see parents with red solo cups standing in the street waiting patiently, sipping unknown cocktails and making sure that no child is abducted or gets an apple with a razor blade.
My house is pitch black, except for the feint blue hue of a tv playing somewhere deep inside.
“Damn. They’re going to ring the bell,” I lament. “We have no candy. Why is the TV on?
Who is inside? don’t they know I am the defiant monk of abstinence on this great pumpkin charlie brown night.
As my garage door opens, two 100 watt bulbs blast into the night. It’s blaring, blinding, UFO abduction bright. It illuminates the front lawn like a beacon from a candy coated light house .
I sense the rat pack coming my way, ready to ring my bell.
Trick or Treat they will say.
I will stare at the vampires, and batmen characters and fairy princesses, I will swallow hard and feel bad.
I will have no candy to give them. I will feel cheap and worthless as I say, go away small children, I do not partake in this pagan festival of evil.
I get out of my car and scurry to the kitchen door.
I press the garage door and feel a sense of relief as it churns to a close. I watch the darkness disappear behind a metallic sheath illuminated by a nuclear bright over head light.
I enter the dark house and exhale.
Why am I am going dark this year?
Because I am doing Halloween elsewhere, a better place where pumpkins are carved and faux spiders sit upon cottony webs.
There is a huge pile of chocolate in the basket at this haunted house of confectioners perfection.
This better Halloween house is bathed in a pumpkin pie orange light of dissemination and satisfaction.
At this trick or treat emporium, I will be the Count Chocula of candy distribution, dressed like a rum stained pirate with eye patch and bad attitude.
But at my own mausoleum of Halloween Hijinx, I am Ebenezer Scrooge giving away darkness.
Why am I so nervous?
Because I have no candy to give, and frankly it would be embarrassing to explain to a 7 year old why my own personal party plans might affect the size and containment ratio of his Halloween sack.
Hey 7 year old, I imagine saying “My cupboard is bare and my halloween heart 3 times too small.”
What if Spiderman knocks on my door? Trick or treat he will say.
“Hey kid, I don’t have any candy, Scram,” I will be forced to respond.
His daddy half liquored up on Jack will eye ball me with consternation and disdain.
I don’t need the aggravation.
What’s the worst that can happen? Today’s youth might end up live streaming my halloween house on Twitter.
“that guy in the brick house on the corner is a jerk. He didn’t give us candy,” the child with the smart phone might tell the inter webs.
Yikes.
Immediate embarrassment. It’s not like when I was a kid. When I was a kid, and we came across a dark house, we made a mental note.
Mr. Jenkins didn’t give us candy. House on the corner.
We didn’t forget that.
We came back with eggs and opened fire.
Splat. Splat. Splat.
Eggs scrambled on vinyl siding is hard to clean.
As a kid, I never understood how someone could go dark, and ruin what is quite possibly the best holiday on the face of the planet.
But now, on this hallows eve, I was Mr. Jenkins.
aaaaarrrrgggghhh.
I sneak through the darkness into my living room.
There I find my 17 year old son, dressed up like Will Farrell in Elf.
“I can see the TV from the street”, I say.
“I know”, he says nervously. “I am afraid they are going to ring the bell and”
his words trail off.
“Don’t you usually have halloween candy, I don’t see any,” he says his elf costume turned blue from ABC nightly news.
He’s right, I do normally have Halloween candy, but this year I forgot.
I head up stairs, tripping over a shoe in the dark.
“Where you going? he asks.
I’m changing into something Pirate like, then going to a place where doorbells ring and children sing trick or treat and candy flows on waves of orange joy.
my son stares at me in the blue hue of darkness.
“What?”
“Never mind. Just turn off the TV and get the hell out while you can.”
Going Dark on Halloween.
Life’s Crazy™