I Hate Trick or Treat

Now you read "I Hate Trick or Treat" and clicked on this because you thought one of three things:

   1. How could anyone hate Halloween? It's so much fun! factgirl is a stick-in-the-mud.

   2. How could anyone hate Samhain? It's so spiritual! This Goddess of Wicca is gonna give that factgirl a little blessed-be-kick-in-the-ass!

   3. Right on, factgirl! Give 'em hell!

Well, all of you are in for a big surprise. I LOVE Halloween. I LOVE dressing up. I LOVE parties! I LOVE all that Goddess crap. What I do not like is Trick or Treat.

Parent: Ok Timmy put a mask on and go up to that door and ask for candy!
Child: But I'm scared!
Parent: Don't worry I'm right here.
Child: Ok
DING DONG (door opens)
Child: Trick or Treat
STRANGER: Hey there Timmy! I'm not a STRANGER anymore! Now take some candy! Did I say I'm not a STRANGER anymore? Come on over anytime! I have Nintendo and Sega! and I always keep good snacks and candy around! Now don't be a STRANGER, y'hear?

or:

Parent: I am such a good parent we will only go to people's houses we know!
Child: But I'm scared!
Parent: Don't worry I'm right here.
Child: Ok
DING DONG (door opens)
Child: Trick or Treat
Friend: Hey there Timmy! How nice to see you. are you going to a big Halloween party? You sure are dressed up fine! You look like a little pokey man! What? you want candy? Oh my goodness candy! Well, Timmy my food stamps don't cover candy so I made these nice caramel apples. Let's just drop one into your little bag. What? Your candy will stick to the apple? Your dad said no apples 'cause of razors? That's horrible! I would never! oh, ok, yes then if you are allergic...All right Happy Halloween to you. Good bye. (door shuts - muffling a sob from inside)

and lastly:

Child: I'm so lucky to be old enough to go without dumb old Mom and Dad! I'm going to get the most candy in the entire world!!!!!!!
NOTE ON DOOR:We are truly sorry, we've had a death in the family, and won't be celebrating Halloween this year.
DING DONG (door opens)
Child: Trick! (egg splatters on widows shoes...children scatter)

Trick or Treat sucks. It is rude. It is stupid. This year I'm giving out toothpaste (yes, one squirt each, right in the bag).

factgirl is the kind of person of whom we need more in this great, terrible, troubled nation of ours.

When I was small, I was very small indeed, and we were very poor as well. We had no money for a Halloween costume, and so mother would wrap me up in a sheet of tarpaper. It formed a crude tube. I could not see. I would stumble down the street, blind as a bat, bumping into people and things. Most of the other children were in a similar fix. When I grew big enough to see over the top of the tarpaper, I finally understood why the blindness had been a mercy all those years: Our street was like a scene out of one of the apocryphal, non-integrally numbered circles of Hell enumerated in the lost appendices to Dante's Inferno. Dozens of children staggered this way and that, encased in black tubes: They looked like a forest of sooty little smokestacks, driven to mad life by unseen malignant forces.

It scared the crap out of me. I vowed never to let my children see such a thing.

But the one thing that was a comfort to me through all those broken years of childhood contusions and benighted despair was this: Many of our neighbors wanted to give us "treats". They would toss pomegranates, coypus, aubergines, and roux into the tops of our tubes. It was up to us to lay hands on the stuff -- not an easy task, given that our hands were pinned fast to our sides by the damned tarpaper. For the most part it was a humiliating excercise in frustration, as was every part of those hellish evenings. However! There was an old lady on our street who gave us toothpaste. I didn't want roux: I was a small child! My teeth were rotting out of my head! I wanted some basic fucking oral hygiene here, folks. And that's what I got.

I've always been grateful to that old lady, and it's to her alone that I owe those few teeth I still have today.