Fun size? What’s fun about less CANDY?
When I was a little kid, I lived on the East Coast and every Halloween I’d Trick or Treat my way home from school. Most people weren’t home from work yet, so it wasn’t very profitable, but it was usually crisp and sunny, with gutters heaped shin-deep with shuffled decks of glossy orange leaves. Other CANDY-intent kids (and in my mind, the word CANDY is forever in all caps) were dutifully knocking on doors whether or not they had a costume.
I always had a costume. My mother bought me some ridiculous inflatable vinyl spider that you tied to your head and wore with a black plastic poncho once. Yeah, I don’t know, either. One year I went as a pile of leaves; the leaves were flexible and shiny when I stapled/Scotch taped them to the leaf-printed twin sheet I’d carefully sawed ragged triangular holes out of with my safety scissors, but they had curled to clutching, brown hands as brittle as corn flakes by the next morning. My baby brother went as a ninja… every year. The color of the costume changed, but he was always a ninja. My brother Everclear went as Elvis one year: gold shades, sideburns glued to his face, spangles taped to his shirt, bitchin’ hill of hair.
I’m old enough to have gone trick or treating sans parents (although they always made me wear my coat over my costume, which made me super pissed – but October 31 on Long Island is chilly indeed) in the third grade, and I remember trying to change my costume and double-dip at The Good Houses. We never went to Halloween parties or anything, just trick or treated until our pillow cases bulged as if they’d been crammed with human heads. I went trick or treating when I was a senior in high school; my friend Juan (who was Colombian) went as a drug kingpin, and my friend Vickie and I went as an old school chaingang of two, with prison outfits complete with striped pillbox hats and plastic manacles. Everywhere we went, people would say, aren’t you a little old for trick or treating? The answer was a hard stare that said: hell no! We’re in costume and the social contract dictates that you cough up the treats. DELIVER. (I should point out that one door was answered by our famously acerbic and rheumy-eyed history teacher – she was rumored to be an alcoholic, but I prefer to believe she just had a lot of trouble with her contacts. I don’t remember if she gave us CANDY or not.)
Some kids threw eggs or bludgeoned each other with socks full of flour or wrote their names in shaving cream on the paintjobs of cop cars. I just looted the neighbors and then came home with my brothers to sort the spoils. I loved costumes, but trading CANDY with my brothers was almost my favorite thing ever. They would eat anything: Dots, Mike&Ikes, those bland, transparent lollipops that looked like flattened, sticky coins of hardened dish detergent. I could trade them squashy-looking popcorn balls (that we weren’t supposed to eat anyway) and they would give me chocolate bars, from the basic waxy Hershey rectangles to the China White of Halloween CANDY: Snickers (although these days, I prefer Milky Way – they taste like luxury).
In the end, it didn’t really matter much. My mom would confiscate the CANDY the next day and promise vaguely to dole it out to us over time, but she never did. It was my belief that she ate it herself, but it’s more likely she gave it to my grandfather — who lived in the house above the converted garage apartments he’d built us — as tribute. (He never raised a hand to his children, but he was legendarily gruff and tyrannical.)
Over the years, I’ve been Lizzie Borden, The Hamburglar, Lady Liberty and a bat. One year I even won a contest (75 bucks!) for dressing as a Valkyrie, with a sword and fake blonde braids topped with a Viking helmet. I was downtown at a costume Dodgeball game at the time, and a lot of people asked if they could take their picture with me. I am now inexplicably forever ensconced on many an Australian tourist’s camera roll archive.
I dig pretty much everything about Halloween: monster movie marathons, little kids in Darth Vader helmets, the dusty spice of autumn in the air, and of course CANDY. There are no presents to buy, no cranky relatives to visit, no fancy dinners to prepare from scratch. It’s you and your friends dressing up like dorks and getting drunk on refined sugar. It’s a guy who somehow made a brilliant costume out of cardboard Coors boxes and empties mashed flat with a mallet. It’s the fresh slime of pumpkin guts and that guy who’s got a Zombie garden in his front yard, the lady across the street who insists on putting a wig on her Chihuahua. It’s just pure community good times: when the heck else do you even see your neighbors, man? And when is it just not fantastic to wear a Wonder Woman costume to work?
In closing, I leave you with a cartoon about the true meaning of Halloween. (I’m not sure that I got the point across, but that meaning is CANDY.)
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My favourite houses were the ones with the lights off and a sign on the door that said SORRY NO CANDY WE ARE JEHOVAH’S WITNESSES.
Lot a lot a Jehovah’s Witnesses in my neighbourhood, growing up.
Heh. Conveniently Jehova’s Witnesses, or just guys who didn’t want to shell out CANDY?
All I know is I think we’d have known if we really were living in what was essentially (ostensibly) a Jehovah’s Witness Compound.
Loved the article (and the Strong Bad quote in the title)! I was usually able to get the better of trades with my sisters, but they figured out where I hid my CANDY and after that it was a moot point.
Technically, I think the line is more like “What’s fun about *eating* less CANDY?”, but it gets the point across. (g)
It makes me unutterably sad that there’s no new Decemberween toon this year.
So: your CANDY of choice? Was it Butterfinger?
My parents let us manage our Halloween proceeds without adult supervision, and for a couple of years, I tried to make it last until the next holiday refill, which was xmas in our house. It was much more difficult to hoard xmas candy until the easter bunny showed up. I should have lobbied harder for family Valentine’s Day observance to provide sufficient candy to cover that gap.