A Real Horror Story for Halloween

On Foxyj's blog she complained today about various aspects of Halloween, so for those (two) of you who've never heard about why my children mostly have good teeth, here goes:

Our first little house, in which we lived till we got four kids, was not visible from the street and so no one ever came by to trick-or-treat on Halloween, thus preventing our children from learning about this tradition. I didn't promote it since I had never gone out on Halloween door to door as a child because I lived on a farm and we had no near neighbors. Instead, we'd dress in our costumes and go to a party always held at our church where the moms brought popcorn balls and fudge and we played at the "fish pond" and bean bag games. We all went home with some candy and had a fun night. In addition to our rural environment there was usually a lot of snow on the ground by Halloween and it was too darn cold to traipse around in the dark for candy.

By the time I had my own children I'd become a militant anti-candy, health food freak who baked and cooked every morsel my off-spring consumed, and so I was not about to send them out into the urban landscape to scavange for sugar. At their school there was a day-time party that mimicked the fun I'd had as a child complete with mothers and the fishpond game, so I was satisfied to make their little costumes and go help with the school party and call it a holiday. In fact, as a little girl, Foxyj once said she liked Halloween because "We can just have fun and not have to think about the "deeper meaning" because there isn't one." True!

Well, finally we had to move to a different house. We needed more room. The next house was on a normal street and when Halloween came around, so did the trick-or-treaters. And now my children had become the age where they realized that they, too, could go out and get the goodies. I finally caved in and let them go. BUT---here were the rules:

• you could only go to two blocks
• when you got home, you had to dump out all the candy
• then you sorted it: one for the kid, two for the mother
• she passed her share back out the door to other kids

So, that is why our children do not have the extensive dental restorations that their mother has. And it is also the reason why in college they always won the "Weirdest Parents" story telling contest. Their parents concealed Halloween from them for nearly a decade.