Today is Halloween! I always enjoyed giving out candy and checking out all the little ghosts and goblins that came to my door for a treat (I always treated because I didn't want to get tricked!). I would sit in the doorway and wait for them all to come up to me with their bags, buckets, or plastic pumkins held out. As I would put the treat into their containers, they would inevitably peer down into the vessel to see what new treasure they had received. Then they would look up at me and smile and most would say 'Thank You' and turn around to run to the next house yelling "TRICK OR TREAT", with their parent(s) in tow.
"So", you ask, "why are you using the past tense when speaking of those days?" Well here is the reason. When I lived in Baton Rouge, I was in a subdivision that housed lots and lots of kids. It was great, and I loved the giving of candy on Halloween night. Then I moved to Walker where I have lived for the past 16 years, 16 Halloweens and NO kids have ever come to my door. I figured out after the first two years of living there and buying candy that I ended up eating (always get candy you like to eat), that we were too far out and the houses are just not close enough together to warrant kids running from house to house.
The ones who do live around there are taken, by their parents, to large subdivisions in the area instead. Tonight on my way home from work, I observed LOTS of traffic on the road with car loads of small masked faces being shuttled from one area to another that had lots of houses. There is a subdivision near Watson that has probably 500 or more houses. The cars carrying those ghosts and goblins were literally lined up to get into that subdivision causing a severe traffic nightmare. It reminded me of the lines at the department stores at Christmas, just crowds of people. But there was a twinge of envy in me when I thought about what I was missing, giving out treats to all those kids and trying to guess who or what they were supposed to be.
I miss them, the little tiny faces telling me what their costume was in case I didn't know. I would always act scared if they were Dracula or Frankenstein or a ghost or some sort of monster. But, even though I also like where I live now, I would love to see them again. I guess Wal-Mart will just have to survive without my Halloween business, since I haven't even thought about buying treats in 14 years now.
And Renee, you thought I didn't like kids! LOL
