Each of these children has put in enough effort to earn a treat, except one - the little one who is wasting everyone's time, perhaps deliberately.
Yesterday was Halloween and if you live in a suburban area you would have experienced trick-or-treating. Unless you’re some kind of angry hermit, you probably don’t mind the knock at the door and the chorus of children announcing their intention to strip you of anything with a sugar content above 50%. You might even send your own little scamps off on trick-or-treating adventures.
I’m all for fun. I don’t mind the concept of trick-or-treating, but yesterday proved to me that today’s kids wouldn’t know a trick-or-treat if it snuck up from behind dressed as Freddy Krueger and scared the living shit out of them. Call me an old stickler, but I thought that the idea of trick-or-treating was to put some effort into a suitably impressive costume, which earns you the right to knock door-to-door demanding treats. If the homeowner doesn’t pay up, then you perform a trick, some mildly irritating or inconvienient mischief.
Not these days. These days, what we experience is a watered-down, politically correct version of trick-or-treating and Michael Myers would turn in his grave, if anybody could ever get him to stay in it.
So many kids knocked on my door yesterday who were wearing costumes that I’d be kind to describe as absolutly pathetic. I’m talking a plastic Dracula mask, and their pyjamas. It’s an arduous task explaining to a six-year-old that what they are wearing does not qualify as a costume, but lame, half-arsed attempts do not earn anyone the right to come knocking on my door demanding lollies. Not this Halloween, not any Halloween – I don’t care what your mummy told you or how disappointed you are. This ‘everyone gets a prize’ mentality that seems to dominate our society’s interaction with children these days does not wash with me when it comes to trick-or-treating.
As for the tricking side of things, forget about it. Yesterday there came a point after about the twentieth knock on the door when, even after purchasing multiple bags of special body-part shaped gummy lollies (see, I’m into it), we ran out. Still more knocks came. My girlfriend and I alternated between hiding and pretending we weren’t home, and awkwardly explaining that we had run out of lollies. Each time a group of unsatisfied children were vacating the property I peered out from between the blinds to try and catch the little bastards out while they performed what I thought was the inevitable – the trick. But there were no tricks. Not one of the six groups of kids who missed out tried to perform any sort of trick on us. Again, pathetic.
During the course of the afternoon and evening we encountered teenagers who were clearly too old to be trick-or-treating, nevertheless going door-to-door, dressed more like they were turning tricks, than earning treats. One was holding a longneck of some pre-mixed drink in a brown paper bag and told us that she would accept money in lieu of lollies when we said we had run out. What a lateral-thinking problem solver she was. The answer was of course ‘no’.
You see, I spent many years in the UK, where the infiltration of Halloween into the culture is much further along than here in Australia. I have memories of our front door being covered in flour and water by a Frankenstein in retaliation for not providing sweets (you can call them that in the UK and not get beaten up). I have memories of my older brother dressed in a hockey mask bursting out of the front door with a terrifying roar and a large kitchen knife to scare away a group of vampires and werewolves that were about to smear dog poo all over the handles of the car.
These days if they tried to smear anything anywhere on someones property, they’d call the police, which is also what would happen if you pursued children from your home with a kitchen knife. All this adds up to an empty, soulless version of Halloween and unless as a society we’re willing to put some effort into our costumes and sit down with our kids and educate them as to the correct trick-or-treating procedure, then I’ve handed out my last gelatine eyeball.
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