Halloween, Then and Now

Tonight is Halloween. I hate Halloween. I hate it because it makes me feel old. It reminds me of what my Halloween nights used to be like, when Pam and I took turns walking these adorable pups around the neighborhood. Now, we sit on the front steps trying to keep Lucy contained behind us, while a parade of other people's adorable kids troop by. Most of them are the sweetest things you've ever seen, but there's always a few knuckleheads, kids who cant be bothered with actually saying, Trick or Treat!! They just stand there, with bags thrust towards us making their silent little demands. Then there's always the older teenagers, shameless leaches, who throw some lame excuse for a costume on at the last minute to horn in on the free candy action. Some dork will come up wearing a t-shirt with a giant vegetable on the front and when you ask this interloper what they're dressed as, they'll say, I'm supposed to be, like...irony. Then you smile and say, Well, ironically enough,....no candy for you, moron!

It's not really that I hate Halloween. It's more accurate to say that I miss it. I miss the days when the little ones were my little ones. Reason number 117 why I need grandchildren!!

But, there's one other thing about Halloween that gets in my craw a bit. When I was a kid, and even when my children were kids, Halloween was exclusively a kids thing. But, like so many other great things in this world that were made for kids, grownups have appeared out of nowhere to ruin everything. It seems like all of a sudden everywhere I look there are fully grown men and women running around dressed in extravagant costumes, throwing their own adult-themed Halloween parties. Men caked up with makeup and glitter, dressed like their favorite Star Wars character, women dressed as slutty versions of otherwise innocuous characters. Oh, look...its Jill from accounting dressed like what Hillary Clinton would look like if she were a hooker! Its one thing when college kids do stuff like this. That's to be expected, I suppose. But when you see some 50 year old suburbanite walking down the street, dressed like Donald Trump with an inflatable likeness of Sean Hannity with his lips attached to Trump's ample backside, well...(actually, that's a bad example since that would be hysterical).

...wait a minute, I wonder if I've got time to throw something together....