Isn’t it funny how your perspective changes on everything once you become a parent? Halloween is the perfect example. As a kid, you never ever think twice about trick or treating, you just do it! It’s FUN! It’s a rite of passage in our country to do the trick or treating thing. From a kid’s perspective, it’s all about getting as much loot as possible, counting and sorting it when you get home, comparing with your siblings and then hiding it. At least that’s how it was for us. 

But as a parent, it just seems so funny to willingly send your child out in the dark to beg for candy from strangers, and then basically take it away and eat it with your husband later.  Why would we let our toddler have that much candy? At least we can still get away with that with our 2 year old. I fear this is the last year we will reap the benefits from our son’s hard labor.  Amazingly, he seems to know where we have hidden his bag of candy and just this morning I woke up with a smack in the face by a bag of Skittles, and him hovering over me asking to open it. Uh oh.

Mostly though, I think back to my own memories of Halloween and my dad. Halloween was my dad’s thing. He was INTO it. But it wasn't the typical haunted house scary stuff. He totally put on a one man freak show. Ours was the house everybody talked about; the one you could not miss. Here’s the scenario…He would dress up in something random he’d find in our dress up chest. It was different every year, but he always wore the same creepy wig. He always looked pretty outrageous, but it wasn’t his get up that made it unique. Did I mention that he took my dolls and basically decapitated them and poured ketchup on them and hung them in the doorway? Over the top, yes, but it was great. I'm not so sure you could get away with that these days. Anyway, I digress. It wasn't so much that as it was his charisma. It was the way he went into full character each time somebody came to the door. You never knew what he was going to pull. The poor unsuspecting kids would say the usual "trick or treat," and he would just improvise…for a long long looooong time. If you dared ring the doorbell at our house, it was GAME ON. Sometimes he’d grab the nearest knick knack in the house he could find, like a vase, and put it in their bag.”NO!" They’d yell. “CAAAAAAANDY!” He’d just grunt and continue with the routine. They had to work for it.  My favorite is when he would reach over and take a big handful of candy OUT of a kid’s bag, and then put it in somebody else’s. The look of shock on their faces was priceless. Not cool! He literally stole their coveted candy and gave it to somebody else.  He usually pulled this one with obnoxious teenagers who tried unsuccessfully to taunt him. He’d give the candy to a little boy or girl who didn’t have much in their bag. Kind of Robinhood-esque, no?

To me, that’s what Halloween is…creativity, laughs, personality. So this year, as we took our toddler out to get candy (for us) for the first time, my dad volunteered to come over and be the one to pass out candy from our house.  I have to say, he’s still got it 30 years later. He brought some of the same spirit to our neighborhood. He made them work for it. “What? You want broccoli? OK here! How about a cat? A shoe! What's that you say? Candy?” Not to mention the zillions of toddler toys in our entry way he tried to pawn off on them. It seems kind of silly, now that I am grown up, but from kids’ perspective, it’s still just as funny as it was three decades ago. He made them laugh-and they will remember, like I do…wanting to come back year after year.