The Hardest Halloween

Newsletter 2023-10-15

It’s almost time for the best holiday of the year. Thanksgiving and Christmas are fine if you’re into friends and family and other nonsensical buzzwords like that. Personally, I’m into unrestrained gluttony, which is the exclusive domain of Halloween. Thanksgiving and to a lesser degree Christmas also try to claim that particular deadly sin, but both do a bad job. They have too many wholesome foods from family recipes passed down through the generations. I want highly processed garbage with nineteen ingredients, not a single one of which has ever existed in nature. Scratch that. I want it to have one ingredient, high fructose corn syrup, which can be molded, shaped, and flavored into literally anything. It’s the 3D printer of food. As a bonus, it has the highest calorie density known to man. A handful of gummy bears contains the same energy as nine standard human meals (ten if you get the sour kind). A single plastic pumpkin full of Halloween candy can power a nuclear reactor for a year. People hand out entire buckets of the stuff one magical night each October. It truly is the best of all possible holidays. I plan to celebrate it harder than ever this year, even if it kills me.

You might be thinking to yourself that I’m too old to trick-or-treat. You’re right, which is why I had kids. Growing up, the cut off age for trick-or-treating in my hometown was twelve. I might have pushed past that a tad, but no one passing out candy ever asked to see my ID. Being asked if you have a driver’s license in the first place is a sure sign the jig is up. Ultimately, I was betrayed by my genetics. I was 6’2” by the time I was fourteen. Adults get suspicious about your age when they have to reach up to hand you candy. I solved that problem by having all girls. My wife has been the size of a middle schooler for her entire adult life, and our daughters are on that same track, give or take a few inches. I’ll be able to get away with taking them trick-or-treating until they’re old enough to have children of their own. At that point, I’ll take my grandkids trick-or-treating. I’m set for life.

The only flaw with my plan is the minor issue of ownership. Technically, all candy belongs to my kids, not to me, but I strongly feel I deserve a cut. All parents do, but the matter has yet to be tested in the Supreme Court. I view my minivan on Halloween night like a pirate ship on the high seas. My sailors do most of the work, but I earn the biggest share of the booty, not only for supplying the vessel, but also for equipping my crew. Those costumes don’t make themselves. They’re manufactured in distant factories, shipped to nearby warehouses, and then overnighted to my house when I suddenly remember it’s time to buy Halloween costumes once again. Somehow, October 31st always sneaks up on me, despite being at approximately the same spot on the calendar every year. Trick-or-treating couldn’t happen were it not for my vital contributions. Really, all the candy should go to me, and my children should be grateful for the privilege of contributing to my impending sugar coma. Unfortunately, my kids insist on getting a portion, too. That’s a core tenet of capitalism. People work harder when they get to keep the fruits of their labors, even if Halloween is simultaneously a socialist paradise where kids get handouts simply for showing up.

I’ve become somewhat unorthodox in my approach to this very traditional holiday. I used to believe firmly in going door-to-door on foot. Halloween was a great time to get out and experience the neighborhood by peering through open doors to get a glimpse of the lives of total strangers. I’ve formed unshakable assumptions about the lives of people who I encounter for literally fifteen seconds each year. To me, you will always just be the guy with a messy coffee table and the TV mounted way too high. My judgments are harsh but fair. Then one year, bad weather forced me to drive my posse the entire way. Instead of parking on a block and then walking from house to house, I gave my kids mechanized transportation to each individual stop. Our productivity increased exponentially. My girls were like helicopter troops swooping in to win a battle and then evacuating without a trace. The only downside was I ended up staying in the van the entire time. I could no longer peek into the lives of strangers to form inaccurate conclusions based on insufficient evidence. I got less human interaction but more candy tonnage. I’m calling that a win.

There’s more to Halloween than trick-or-treating, although the candy spree is, without question, the main event. Pumpkin carving is the one time a year I express any kind of creativity. (Writing doesn’t count. I’m more reporting than creating, even if I sometimes report on kids who don’t exist on a fictional moon base far away.) There’s something fundamentally satisfying about cutting into an orange gourd to make a face. Perhaps I have some pent up aggression that needs an outlet, or maybe I’m just entranced by an art form that lets me stick to simple, straight lines without embarrassing myself. I’m not one of those fancy pumpkin artists you see on TV. Actually, I’m not sure that pumpkin carving shows, food challenge shows, and the rest of that genre even exist anymore. I guess I’m not like one of those fancy pumpkin carving artists you see in a BuzzFeed listicle. All of my pumpkins have simple triangle eyes with a triangle nose. Sometimes they have basic smiles and other times basic grimaces. As with my real face, both expressions are almost the same. It takes me thirty seconds to carve a pumpkin that’s the artistic equivalent of a stick figure drawing, and that’s if I’m not in a hurry. I’m also amazing at gutting pumpkins. I don’t know any deadly combat arts, but I am adept at the tactical use of a spoon. My preferred way to handle a pumpkin carving day is to quickly gut all the pumpkins myself and then let the kids carve them. Invariably, they complain about that approach. They want to get in on the gutting action, too. They don’t want to be helpful. They want to make a mess. It’s what they do best.

jack o lantern on brown wooden table

I used to feel so empty inside when I carved one pumpkin a year. It would be over in the blink of an eye and then I’d have to wait twelve months before I could stab something again. I solved that problem when, a few years ago, I realized I could carve multiple batches of pumpkins. There’s no law stopping me. At least not that I know of. If there is one against it, please don’t tell me since ignorance of the law is always an effective defense in court. I typically buy six pumpkins a week for the first three weeks of October. In the final week, I go ham and fill my van with them. Pumpkins are a perishable commodity, especially after you cut them open. There’s not a chance in the world that the ones we carve in early October will make it to the end of the season. I threw out the first batch yesterday. They had a level of decomposition worthy of a horror movie. They simultaneously melted, grew mold, and hosted swarms of bugs. They were so gross that the squirrels wouldn’t even eat them. Naturally, I tossed the pumpkins to my pigs. They gobbled them up like they were free breadsticks at Olive Garden. Before you accuse me of being a bad pig owner (which I probably am), keep in mind that pigs were humanity’s garbage disposals for thousands of years. They smell refuse before they eat it to make sure nothing in there will disagree with them. They love rotting pumpkins but automatically reject bell peppers and potato skins. I eat both things in that second category. Apparently I’m the one ingesting poison.

The best part of Halloween is that it’s expanding. It’s the one time of year I don’t mind holiday creep. This year, Halloween events kick off the weekend before the actual day. That Saturday, we have a trunk-or-treat at church and another one sponsored by the town. Actual trick-or-treating won’t commence until that Tuesday. All holidays should float and be assigned not to a specific date, but to a certain day of the week. Abraham Lincoln had the right idea by pinning Thanksgiving to the last Thursday in November. Normally, I’m not a fan of any holiday in the middle of the week, but putting one that close to the end means no one is expected to work Friday. Forcing employees to come in on that day is against the Geneva Convention. Likewise, Halloween should be pegged to the last Saturday in October. I realize that doing it on a Friday would give kids the entire weekend to eat through their candy haul, but you have to take costume prep time into account. Getting kids painted up and outfitted can be a Herculean task, especially if you have to convince them to cover their thoughtfully crafted outfit with a heavy winter coat. In the Midwest, some years the only thing anyone dresses as is bundled up Minnesotans. It’s actually a pretty scary costume when you realize the outer layer of Minnesota nice covers a deeper level of Minnesota nicer. That kind of wholesomeness burns me like fire. Having Halloween on Saturday would also give adults time to prepare for Halloween parties, and by that I mean make a run to the liquor store. If the adult party requires a costume, it’s best to just wear your regular clothes and make up a flimsy explanation for why. I usually say I’m dressed as the personification of regret. One look at my face will show I pulled it off perfectly.

Of course, adults don’t really need Halloween at all. I can buy my own candy and wear my  regular clothes any day of the week. But holidays have never been about “need.” There’s no reason you have to write down what you want someone else to buy you for Christmas rather than going on Amazon and ordering it yourself. The purpose of life is to make things more complicated and theatrical than they need to be. Don’t just visit family. Visit family while exchanging household goods you picked out yourself and then made a third party buy on your behalf. Don’t just blow up things in the sky. Blow up things in the sky for America. Don’t just eat candy. Eat candy handed to you by strangers in the dark. Holidays give us a chance to act irrationally for a reason. That reason is we made the same bad decision in all the years before. Without Halloween, I might forget to eat myself sick on Reese’s Peanut butter cups once a year. With adulthood comes the danger of accidental self-control. The best bad habits are self reinforcing. This Halloween, I’m going to go harder than ever before. In so doing, I hope to pass on those bad habits to my own children. They’ll grow up to raise overzealous Halloween kids of their own. They just can’t go trick-or-treating with them. I need to steal my grandchildren so I can keep going myself.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.

James