Monday, October 24, 2005

Save Halloween!

No, I'm not talking about Samhain. They may happen to fall on the same date, but I view them as seperate holidays. Samhain is a more mature holiday of reverence and retrospection. Halloween though is mostly a kid's holiday that's all about breaking their traditional rules for one day, dressing up like something you think is totally sweet (I was ussually either a vampire or ninja) and heading out for an almost divine conquest in search of the holy grail of childhood- vast, unspeakable ammounts of candy.

In other words, Halloween rocked.

But it feels like it's dying. Every year I see less and less kids out there. Are parents too scared to let their children wander their own neighborhood? I think so, since lame-ass "trick-or-treats" held at malls 2 days before Halloween at 3pm in the afternoon (Can it get any lamer!?) have become increasingly popular. Even if the kid gets the same ammount of candy doing that, it's still nothing near the original. Trick-or-Treating isn't about candy. It's about conquest. A conquest for candy, but still a conquest nonetheless. Routes are carefully mapped to include the known "hot-spots" while the houses that hand out crap like toothbrushes are skipped over to maximize candy potential, all in almost impossible hopes of amassing an entire black trash bag full of candy (We all heard someone was able to do it last year), which we all knew was the standard for being a Halloween -legend-. Just throw a bunch of candy at a kid and it just isn't the same.

Anyways, I degress. Halloween rocked and paranoid parents are killing it! Why are we so afraid to go out into our community? Do we really think that everyone we live next to are a bunch of sadistic child-hating freaks? I think it all comes from the death of the neighborhood. People no longer seem to take an active role in their neighboorhood, no longer interact much with the people they live just down the street from. Instead we've become increasingly isolated from those literally closest to us, and as such, distrustful. And Halloween is a great way to combat that. Kids dressing up and going around the neighborhood gives all of us a chance to see that the person down the street is just a normal, friendly person. But we're so afraid of that interaction with our neighbors that we instead deprive our children of one of our fondest childhood memories and drag them to a mall to trick-or-treat in the middle of the afternoon?

Well I'm not going to stand for it. We need to bring back Halloween! Carve those pumpkins! Put up those cheesy Halloween decorations from Wal-Mart. And dish out tons of candy for those kids (Especially if they say thank you. Parent's like it when you help teach their kids basic manners). This holiday kicks too much ass to just fade away and be forgotten.

What do you think?

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