Me too. I teach class until 9pm, and in my area, most trick or treating stops at 830 maaaaaybe 9 at the latest.
I live on the top floor of an apartment building and kids don’t always know that I’m giving out candy, though I put out little candles on my landing and stuff, so I am the oposite of an earlier doper’s grandma. I always buy to much, and the later it gets, the more desparately I hand out huge handfuls of candy.
I just got to see my little cousins who stopped by to show off their costumes. They looked great-the eldest was Zorro, the middle was a hula girl, and the youngest had his mummy costume his mother made by sewing strips of old sheet to a pair of sweats and a ski mask.
grayhairedmomma, I really pity your kids. All you’re teaching them is how to feel left out when everyone else gets to have fun. If you TRULY dislike having them go around “begging”, throw a Halloween party for their friends.
The fact that she describes kids as selfish, and this holiday as feeding their greed (paraphrased) says it all about what kind of mom she is.
Well, let’s not go to far with this sort of pile-on without giving her a chance to respond. Perhaps she is a wonderful mother who is just horribly horribly misguided as to what this holiday is all about. Unfortunately, it’s not a rare thing.
Can I perhaps raise the temperature a little by adding “Packs of feral rat children who ring my doorbell hundreds of times demanding I give you sweets - Bite Me”?
I live in London, and over here the whole ‘trick or treat’ nonsense consists of:
[ul]
[li]Every business trying to flog cheap Halloween-themed crap[/li][li]Lots of horrible brats I have never seen before ringing my doorbell in the expectation that I will for some reason give them sweets, and threatening to vandalise things if I don’t.[/li][/ul]
Fuck that - you want sweets, go ask your friends, your parents or your relatives. In the US it may be some sort of wonderful neighbourhood bonding experience, if you happen to live in white-picket-fence Laura Ingalls territory.
I live in a big city where most people don’t even know their neighbours faces, never mind their names. Why they hell would I want to get to know their kids? Fortunately my neigbourhood is overwhelmingly Bengali, with a recent influx of Eastern Eruopeans, so the problem is much reduced compared to some places.
Jeesh! Why don’t you just yell “bugger off” to 'em through the door? No one is forcing you to participate.
Why does it matter that the kids in your neighborhood are Bengali? Do they TnT? The Indian kids here do–and they’re polite.
I can see your point–TnTing in a big city is a different proposition that in a smaller town. But I can’t help but think that the unspoken threat of vandalism is overblown.
Go out or just don’t answer the door. Chances are nothing awful will happen to you or your property (and if it does, contact the authorities).
Boo to you! 
This is the way that I feel and felt about Halloween too. The candy was just the icing on the cake, which is why my cousins (who lived with me) and I shared it with my parents, visitors, and friends, and combined our haul together to make one huge stash. If it was all about the greed we’d have been stingy with our sweets. Perhaps grayhairedmomma was miserly with her candy, and has a warped (imo) view of the holiday because of that.
You got cake? :eek:
Years ago, my girlfriend and I would sit out on the front porch with “The gay guys next door”, giving out treats. The guys next door would always make a party out of it, serving mixed drinks and appetizers. (To us, not the ToTers.) One year, they brought out a platter of shrimp and cocktail sauce. It was amazing how many kids bypassed the candy and went straight for the shrimp. We never let them have any, of course. We figured that the neighborhood parents wouldn’t appreciate us giving the kids seafood.
Yeah, to say that Halloween is all about the greed is like saying Christmas is all about the wreaths. The point could hardly be missed by a farther margin.
I said in an earlier post that I have to work tonight so can’t T-ot-T with the kids.
I hope the kids save me the “Chick Tract” the (not so) old lady on the next block hands out in leiu of candy. I get bummmed if I don’t get my annual chick tract!
I know this is a joke, but actually, yes we did. My mother loves to bake and has a cake for every occasion. Going to my parents house in late Oct. = getting a slice of pumpkin shaped cake with orange frosting.
Can you blame them? Clearly the neighborhood children have good taste.
This surely proves the evil that is Halloween- “nice” costumes and horses doovers served by gay guys…an obvious conversion attempt!
Hey, trade you all of my mini Kit-Kats for your candy corn . . .
Yes, I suspect all will become clear tonight when all the children show up dressed as either Judy Garland or min metrosexuals. 
I’m sure they feel the same way about you.
And I’ll trade you all my chocolate, even the Special Dark minis, for all your horehound drops and rootbeer barrels.
Mrs. Magill and I will be taking turns toting Elmo^W Fang around the neighborhood tonight. I’m looking forward to it.
Rationing: My mother wouldn’t ration our candy, but she would check it for things we “didn’t like”. To this day, I still don’t believe I “didn’t like” Tootsie Pops.
Crappy Hand-outs: In elementary school, I dreaded Hallowe’en, not because of the scary costumes, but because Mom gave out little boxes of raisons. My brother and I were Social pariahs until the middle of November. I apologies to the other IBM kids from Boca Raton. She got better after she got to Raleigh.
Neighborhood bonding: My parents’ street would have a cookout in the cul-de-sac in front of my parents’ house on Hallowe’en night before the kids would go trick-or-treating. I am looking forward to doing that on our street. The three families there now get on real well. We are hoping that the new families who will be here next year will be up for that.
Oh and fessie, I would stay off the parenting boards. You’d stay saner that way. I swear there are more train wrecks per thread on those things than The Pit during an election year.
I now have to retrieve some foodstuff from my right nostril after reading that.
Good rant, Fessie. I’m with you in principle, though I don’t know any parents like that – which, when you consider how close I live to Cambridge, Mass, is a little bit strange. For my kids, Halloween is one of the high points of the year. It’s not just about the candy, it’s about the whole experience. It’s at least partly about *escaping *rationing for once. Anyway, the idea that kids will eat enough candy to make themselves puke I take to be a legend. I’ve never heard of it happening, and I can’t imagine it happening, either. And even if it did happen, so what? No parenting without puking, I say.
Besides, God knows we impose enough restrictions on our kids these days. We try to ge the kids on board with the restrictions, and they’re generally willing. But if we were to X out Halloween, we would definitely in their eyes be crossing that line from good parenting to outright sadism.
If grayhairedmomma’s kids aren’t into trick-or-treating, fine – no one’s forcing them to go. But at the same time, I’d like to hear that they’re not being encouraged to think of themselves as superior on that account.
Trick-or-Treat aged children + 1 Hefty Bag sized supply of sugar, cocoa & food dye = Guaranteed Gluttony.
Video games & shit that passes for TV programming are also key aspects of our culture; but don’t tell me I have to allow my children to participate to the point they become slothlike, lard-assed vidiotic, couch potatos.
Just like you wouldn’t pour out 50# of kibble in a wheelbarrow tray for your dog, you have to ration the amount of candy your kids eat. To do anything less would border on negligence.
Not necessarily true. I’m not a big candy fan. I’d much rather have a bag of chips. My Halloween candy stash lasted pretty much intact until my mom would get sick of it and throw it out in mid December.
Yet Halloween is my favorite holiday.