Skeletons and Chocolate Bars are my Love Language

I’ve struggled to come up with something about Halloween I don’t like and can’t come up with anything. Surely, you must be thinking, there has to be one itty-bitty little part he doesn’t love about that holiday. Try as I might, I’m coming up blank. While kids in Christmas poems fall asleep with visions of sugar plums dancing in their heads, I prefer thinking about vampires and werewolves as I drift off to sleep. The costumes, the candy, the whole shebang. I have a throw blanket on the back of my recliner that looks like an Ouija board and I drink my morning coffee from a mummy-shaped coffee mug. Halloween was made for me.

Aside from all the monsters and horror movies and creepy crawlies, I think the reason I loved Halloween so much as a kid was because I felt so empowered. I got to pick my costume. I got to pick which houses I trick-or-treated. I got to sort my candy any way I chose, and ate what I wanted when I wanted, even if it led to a tummy ache. I didn’t bake the turkey on Thanksgiving or decide what time we visited Grandma on Christmas, but Halloween always felt like it was about me.

Take that feeling and wrap it in the creepiest wrapping paper you can think of. I’m know there are people who look forward to the annual batch of Hallmark Christmas movies — you know, the ones where that girl meets that guy and it doesn’t look look it’s going to work out but then they get thrown into a situation together and by the end, they’re a couple? Yeah, that one — but not me. Even the holiday specials I loved as a kid, like the Rankin-Bass stop motion classics and A Charlie Brown Christmas, don’t seem that exciting to me anymore. No, what I want are monster movies. My idea of a good holiday film is a house full of saucy sorority sisters getting chased by a chainsaw-wielding maniac. I watch a lot of Pluto TV (a free streaming platform) and last weekend they were showing Halloween II, Leprechaun 4: In Space, and Surf Nazis Must Die all at the exact same time. How’s a man to choose? I love the old black and white classics, I love 80s slasher films, I love documentaries about haunted houses, I love Halloween baking competitions. Halloween is this four-week period where the whole world is decorated with stuff I like. I’ll take fake cobwebs over tinsel and glitter any day of the week.

I don’t think I bought my 12-foot skeleton the second year they were being sold. I had just moved into a new neighborhood — one with am HOA and a gate — and I wasn’t quite ready to test the waters yet. The following year, I decided to take my chances and spend $300 on a 12-foot tall piece of (a little) metal and (mostly) plastic to stand in front of my house on Halloween.

Normally I prefer homemade costumes and decorations when it comes to Halloween. As a kid there was nothing worse than running into another kid in the neighborhood wearing the exact same costume you had on. I rarely had to worry about that; as a kid my mom made a lot of my costumes, and looking back I am so appreciative of that. I was a little hesitant about buying the 12-foot skeleton because I was afraid everyone would have one and what’s the fun in that? Fortunately there don’t seem to be a lot of people shelling out $300 for oversized yard decorations, at least not in this neighborhood. They’re certainly not rare, but having one makes you an honorary member of the weirdo clan. There’s a whole ‘nother club of people who keep this things up year round, decorating them like leprechauns and the Easter Bunny and even Santa when it’s time, but again with my HOA in mind, I take mine down the first week of November like a thief in the night before some uptight Karen can stick a nastygram in my mailbox.

(I will admit to, on a couple of occasions, moving the skeleton to the backyard and lighting it up with spotlights just to piss off the neighbors. It’s ironic that the gate at the entrance of the neighborhood was designed to keep riff-raff out, when in reality they locked themselves in with me…)

Several years ago on Halloween when my kids were younger, I was out trick-or-treating with them when we knocked on the door of what seemed like a mansion. It was a large two-story house with white pillars on the porch and a fancy gold door knocker that was probably for looks. I used it anyway. When the man answered the door he gave my kids and I a look and then asked, “do you guys live in this neighborhood?” Casually I said yes and pointed down the street toward our house. The man then reached inside and grabbed a different bowl of candy. “Kids from this neighborhood get chocolate bars,” he said. “Everyone else gets apples.”

By “everyone else” he meant poor kids. See, my old neighborhood had kind of a reputation for decorating for Halloween and houses giving out “the good stuff” — so much so that families from other neighborhoods came to ours to trick-or-treat. We’re not talking about busses lining the streets or anything, but there were definitely a lot more people out trick-or-treating than there were people living in the neighborhood.

I grew up in a blue-collar neighborhood. Everybody worked on cars in their driveways and nobody was rich. We didn’t have too little and we didn’t have too much but we always had enough. The thought of going to another neighborhood to trick-or-treat as a kid never crossed my mind. Why would it? In my neighborhood, the majority of houses handed out candy. And the neighborhood was safe.

It took me about 90 seconds to go from mildly amused to filled with rage as we left that guy’s house. It took a minute for it to sink in, but something about the situation really rubbed me the wrong way, for so many reasons. First of all, the kids who are trick-or-treating and getting punished for this are not the ones who came up with this idea; it was their parents — parents who, god forbid, took their kids to a different, potentially safer neighborhood where people decorate for Halloween and hand out candy. But it pissed me off even more because even though it’s been 40 years since I wore a costume and went house to house trick-or-treating, I can still remember the houses that handed out the good stuff. I also remember the ones that handed out bad stuff, like church pamphlets or rock hard popcorn balls, and I still feel all bad about all the eggs…

It was that year that I decided from now on, we hand out full-size candy bars on Halloween. To everybody.

Life’s hard. If you’re a kid living somewhere where your parents are taking you somewhere else to trick-or-treat, your life is probably harder than mine. Can I solve the world’s problems? No. Can I give a kid a Halloween they’ll remember? I hope so.

I want to take a moment to tell you how my October has been going. On the first of October, I was furloughed. I haven’t worked, not been paid, in over a month. Less than a week after that, the pipe feeding our hot water heater burst, filling half our house with an inch of water. My wife and I spent a week bouncing between the house and a hotel as a disaster team cleaned up the mess. Carpet, baseboards, and ruined furniture have been removed. The total cost for the repairs is in the tens of thousands of dollars, although thanks to insurance, we’re only out of pocket a couple of thousand dollars so far. (Did I mention I’m not getting paid?) While removing soggy furniture from wet, ruined carpet I hurt my back (I have an MRI scheduled for next week). Over the past week, my daughter’s apartment had a fire — she’s okay, but the damage was bad enough that they’ve relocated her to another apartment (moving costs on us) and a couple of days ago, my son was involved in a minor fender bender (he got side-swiped by a driver without insurance in a parking lot). It hasn’t been a great month.

And you know what? Kids in costume knocking on doors and expecting candy don’t care about any of that, which is why I put a hold on everything one afternoon and dragged out “Skelly” (he really needs a better name). I set up the flood lights and I dragged out Slimer from Ghostbusters and my 6’ skeleton that normally stays in my home office (“Mick Rib”) and my plague doctor statue and a few other things. On Halloween night, I did my best to forget about the bills, the stress, all the static that comes with adulting, and sat out on the front porch handing out candy bars to kids. I don’t care what neighborhood they came from. All I care about is that they’re in costume and they say “trick-or-treat.”

I hope it makes their night as good as it made mine.

Happy Halloween.