As Halloween approaches, I cannot help but think of how relevant Jerry Seinfeld's decades-old take on the holiday is. The very concept was cool, even before you fully understood it, or, that's how it was for me. But once you understood it, it became a quest to out-do your peers by conning your friends and their parents into taking you to the "good" neighborhoods where one was guaranteed to receive "name" candy. And yes, we probably were a bit too old to be trick-or-treating those last few years, much the way Seinfeld was.
What about those early years? How well do most of us remember those? For me, my first few Halloweens were not the ambiguous, always relatable, and endlessly funny days that Mr. Seinfeld describes. While I can definitely relate to the horrible quality of 80s era, mass-produced costumes (the best available to me), I cannot relate to ever visiting "everyone we know" for them to give us candy. We never went anywhere but to the four or five homes on our cul-de-sac that left their lights on after sunset, because that's when my father would begrudgingly take us. It wasn't until we were much older, and much more self-sufficient (and had options), that my father would agree to accompany us on Halloween, if only to drive the car while we traveled on foot.
My children were born in the spring and thus were old enough to participate for their first Halloween at 7-8 months old. Their mother made sure to dress them up in cute costumes, but stroller rides don't have the same pizazz as toddlers who have a higher level of comprehension as to what is going on. We took them trick-or-treating for as long as they could tolerate it before going home in their respective first years, but the real magic didn't happen until their second Halloween. Food made more sense and so did sweets, but more than that, gifts made more sense.
That second Halloween for my daughter wasn't memorable because of the "good" neighborhood, the numerous homes we visited, or any of the "name" candy. No, what made it memorable was her gleefully exclaiming "thank you," which sounded more like "DEE-DOO," after every piece of candy was placed into her plastic pumpkin. She couldn't wait to get to the next house just so she could issue her chirpy gratitude, which seemed to be a hit at every home we visited. She had more endurance than we did that night by a long shot.
My son's second Halloween contrasted with his sister's in every way their personalities do. At first, when he saw people reaching toward him, he drew back, suspicious of hands reaching for his precious trick-or-treating pumpkin, going so far as to hide his pumpkin behind his back at our first stop. By the third home, however, and after much convincing from us at the first two, hearing that clunk of candy hitting the bottom of his pumpkin was music to his ears, and the race was on. He was sprinting from home to home, as fast as his little legs could take him. It was all we could do to keep up.
The irony of it all: I don't have a sweet tooth. Neither do my children. Despite that, we still embrace Halloween every year as much as my children did on their second, with my son sprinting from door to door as we struggled to keep up, and my daughter's exclamations of "DEE-DOO" in place of "thank you" permanently etched into our memories. Halloween won't always be this way for us as parents, but I'll take as many as I can get, for however long it lasts.
