Kids these days. A Halloween Rant of Sorts.
Nov 1st, 2007 by Brian
It’s true. I live in the suburbs. I live outside the Beltway in a quiet neighborhood of thirty year old town homes surrounded by leafy green trees. Neighbors are friendly enough, though not like back in the day when I was growing up, when everyone seemed to know everyone else’s business. Now we mostly keep to ourselves, nodding as we pass the short distance from car to front door.
Maybe it’s the limited interaction that breeds the behaviour witnessed last night.
It was Halloween and I had the standard candy bat signal illuminated (the front porch light). Kids know not to bother with dark houses and wanting to go the extra mile I plugged in the holiday lights left over from the Oktober Fiesta. In an instant 300 mini-white lights wrapped around the front yard tree burned into the dark night creating a beacon that I hoped said “Candy here! Please come and get it so I don’t spend the rest of the night consuming more calories than I ever should in one sitting:”
I had delayed my arrival home that evening to enjoy the final hour of daylight and photograph a section of the battlefield near my office (yes, again). Pulling up to the house I saw a small horde of kids soliciting the family from a few doors down. I hurried into the house and grabbed the bowl of candy already prepared by my housemate (my housemate who made the wiser choice of abandoning ship for the warm embrace of the Arlington Draft House and a showing of everyone’s favourite comedy zombie movie, Shaun of the Dead).
A timid knock…
Pulling open the door I was confronted with a group of kids, probably of middle school age, decked out in what appeared to be the clothes they wore to school that day (also for some of the boys I’d wager they wore the clothes they’d slept in and probably worn the day before). Not a costume in the bunch of seven or eight. Not a costume, not a mask, but bags… they all had bags thrust forward and held open with greedy hands.
I waited in the open doorway, stainless steel mixing bowl chock full of chocolaty goodness held high so they could not see the contents. I waited. I waited for these lame ass un-costumed kids to at the very least say “trick-or-treat” because there was no way they were getting any of my candy without even a modicum of effort.
“How’s it going?” I asked, breaking the ice and pretending that groups of adolescents knocking on my door at night was no unusual occurrence. Still nothing.
It was a classic Nash equilibrium, only, I held the candy. Because I was still holding the bowl high and out of their eye sight I literally had the upper hand. Except, I love Halloween and I really wanted to hear the words, so I broke down…
“You got to say the words,” I said.
They knew I had them and relented. “Trick or treat,” finally leaked out of their mouths and I began to hand out candy.
I wasn’t done though. They still were in their lame street clothes so I inquired in a voice both mocking and inquisitive, “Sooo… What are you dressed as?”
“Man, this guy’s tough,” someone towards the back muttered.
“I’m a basketball player,” some scrawny four foot five kid exclaimed. “Sure you are,” I said.
They did not linger on my porch. They knew what they were doing. And I knew what they were doing. And now they knew that I knew. I just kept smiling and handing out candy.
This scene repeated several times over the next hour. Kids would knock. I would answer, then wait to hear the magic words. Even a majority of the costumed kids had to be prompted for trick-or-treat.
Luckily, all hope was not lost. A few kids, though mostly only the youngest and escorted by parents, a few kids knew the drill. They would knock, say trick or treat, say thank you and Happy Halloween… These were the ones I liked. The other ones, the ones apparently raised by wolves (or worse over protective and coddling parents who straddle the Booomer/Generation X border line), those kids can just go to hell.
