The malls and churches around here seem to go to a lot of effort to convince parents trick or treating is inherently unsafe, to guarantee themselves an attendance at their own bait and switch events. Razor blades! Poisoned candy! Evil curses! Kidnappers! Bring your kids to us instead and we’ll give them some DumDums and candy corn and not incidentally offer you shoes or religion to buy while they’re collecting.

Meanwhile, you grow more mistrustful of your own community, and less inclined to support each other, and more appreciative of our churches or companies. (And of course it’s easier to vote down school bonds a few days later if you don’t know any families who send their kids to public schools.)

All part of a process to turn you from citizens into consumers of what we want you to have, material or otherwise.

Halloween’s part of how we hold our communities together.

So a couple days ago someone knocked on the door, and it turned out to be some guys wanting to talk to me about God. I cut them off, grabbed my bucket, patted them on the heads, told them how *adorable* they were, and handed them some candy. “Now what do you say?”

Pricelsss. This SO cracked me up.

Every year follows the same pattern. First you have little kids who have just started trick or treating, so they are courteous and still look somewhat surprised that just knocking on a door with mommy in the background will result in perfect strangers giving you, glory of glories, candy! This is amazing, can we do it again next week mom?

The next phase is slighly older kids who are munching candy between stops and are now on a sugar-high and are heading into obnoxious and demanding (last night’s favorite statement: “all you’ve got is peanut M&M’s? That’s crap!”). About an hour of frenzied door bell ringing ensues.

The final phase of the night is kids who are waaaaayyyy too old to still be trick or treating but haven’t discovered eggs, toilet paper, or heavy petting yet. One stood at the door last year looking at me; I assumed she was the mom of one of the little kids who had just got their fun sized treat until she said trick or treat to me.

*Buy what we think is “just enough”, of a type of candy we don’t like, so diabetic me doesn’t get uncomfortable cravings every time I see the basket sitting there. Then, on Halloween:
*6:30pm – “we’re doing OK, there’s enough candy for tonight;
*7:30 – “hmmm, we may be in trouble”;
*8:30 – “Do I need to go to the store?” “No, I think we’re mostly done.”
*8:45 – “Uh, we have five pieces of candy left. You better go to the store.”
*9:00 – Back from the store. One piece of candy left in the basket before I reload;
9:30 – Turn out the front porch light, no one’s come in half an hour. Still have one more piece of candy than that last bag added to the basket;
First school day after Halloween: Mrs. Cap’n PHealy takes candy to work to give to the poor High School seniors, who were too old to trick-or-treat, after all…

Next year: repeat.

Must buy excess candy today, to give to the little bitty new doctors next week for their afternoon fellowship session. Evidently they can’t listen to the professor for more than an hour at a time without refreshments….