It's The Halloween Update, Charlie Brown!
This post was first made on October 31, 2007, on Facebook.
"ROLL 2D6 TO HIT THE ICE DRAGON LOLOLOLOL"
Halloween was always a difficult holiday for me as a child. On my first Halloween (I was probably three) my parents took me to only a few houses at around 2:30 in the afternoon or so. That night I had one piece of chocolate (all that my mother would allow) and, coincidentally, had the stomach flu later on that night and for a long time after associated chocolate with violent nausea. When I was four, I went trick or treating again: I would run up to the door, ring the doorbell, shout "Trick or treat!" at the person who opened the door, and then, when they started to give me candy, say, "No thank you, I don't like chocolate." I went on to be the vice president of the high school debate team and not kiss a girl until I was 17.
Even after my bumpy start and the realization that I wasn't allergic to chocolate, Halloween was pretty stressful for the young Truman Capps. Every year I insisted on going as something different, my reasoning being that if I was going to get candy for free then I damn well ought to put at least some effort into the affair. I didn't like Power Rangers or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which severely limited my choices, and every horror movie character scared me far too badly to try to impersonate one, which meant that every year I had to think up more and more obscure things to go as. In fourth grade I put on a white cardboard box with black dots drawn on and went as dice, which, while pretty lame, is kind of funny when you consider that I wound up playing a lot of Dungeons and Dragons later in life.
I gave up on Halloween after my little dice adventure (my friends kept shoving me in an attempt to 'roll' me, and it's really tough to get up when 3/4ths of your arms are stuck inside cardboard) and never looked back. Every year I'd fret for weeks about what to dress up as while everyone else just went as the Red Ranger again and again, tolerate all the antics of 11-year-olds hopped up on Pixie Stix for the entire evening, and then get home with a buttload of candy when I really didn't even like candy all that much. If the custom was to give out garlic bread, or meatloaf, or pornography, I'd probably be trick or treating right now, but instead I was going through an awful lot of heartache and trouble for something I didn't even like that much in the first place ("Congratulations, you've won the Boston Marathon! Here's a wet sock.").
So I stopped trick or treating, and everyone else kept trick or treating. As they got older, my classmates started to care even less about what pretended to be. By high school, half of them had ditched the notion of a costume altogether and just went trick or treating in jeans and a T-shirt, and then came back through the neighborhood a few hours later with eggs and rolls of toilet paper and baseball bats for unsuspecting pumpkins (ironically, I'd seen at least a few of these kids crying in elementary school after their pumpkins had been smashed). The other half kept up with the costumes, but they started to get dirtier. A lot of the girls who had been princesses and fairy godmothers when I was eight were now going as naughty nurses, naughty policewomen, naughty businesswomen, naughty astronauts, naughty fry cooks, naughty newpaper editors, naughty nuns, naughty bloggers, naughty UN Secretary Generals, and so on and so forth into naughty infinity. A great many of the boys would spend an afternoon shopping for tacky clothing at a thrift store and go trick or treating as pimps.*
*Fun fact about pimps: they beat destitute, emotionally fragile women with pipes if those women don't give them enough of the money they've made having sex with anonymous men who might be serial killers. Just keep that in mind next time you're trying to think of who you want to pretend to be.
Now that I'm in college, Halloween is less about trick or treating and more about getting dressed up and drinking, explaining why I'm sitting in my room writing this at 10:00 on October 31st ("No thank you, I don't like beer."). The University Housing system, in its infinite wisdom, decided that it'd be a good idea to have parents bring their toddlers into the dorms to trick or treat, and right now little kids hyped up on sugar are running up and down the halls among big kids hyped up on something different (I suspect marijuana cigarettes).
And that's what's so brilliant about Halloween: in the spirit of a holiday with origins in paganism and witchcraft, parents in a largely Judeo-Christian culture dominated by media-bred fear of the outside world are willing to take their children into a dormitory full of college students celebrating the same holiday in a very different way. On Halloween, people go out of their comfortable little houses and neighborhoods and interact with other people on a wide scale, save for certain extreme Christian sects and the occasional lonely blogger. On what other holiday do millions of people go out, talk to strangers, give candy to people they’ve never met before, and then head home again? Not on Kwanzaa, that’s for sure.
Happy Halloween, everybody! Next week’s blog will be funnier, I promise!
Truman Capps means no disrespect to those who celebrate Kwanzaa. Both of them.
"ROLL 2D6 TO HIT THE ICE DRAGON LOLOLOLOL"
Halloween was always a difficult holiday for me as a child. On my first Halloween (I was probably three) my parents took me to only a few houses at around 2:30 in the afternoon or so. That night I had one piece of chocolate (all that my mother would allow) and, coincidentally, had the stomach flu later on that night and for a long time after associated chocolate with violent nausea. When I was four, I went trick or treating again: I would run up to the door, ring the doorbell, shout "Trick or treat!" at the person who opened the door, and then, when they started to give me candy, say, "No thank you, I don't like chocolate." I went on to be the vice president of the high school debate team and not kiss a girl until I was 17.
Even after my bumpy start and the realization that I wasn't allergic to chocolate, Halloween was pretty stressful for the young Truman Capps. Every year I insisted on going as something different, my reasoning being that if I was going to get candy for free then I damn well ought to put at least some effort into the affair. I didn't like Power Rangers or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which severely limited my choices, and every horror movie character scared me far too badly to try to impersonate one, which meant that every year I had to think up more and more obscure things to go as. In fourth grade I put on a white cardboard box with black dots drawn on and went as dice, which, while pretty lame, is kind of funny when you consider that I wound up playing a lot of Dungeons and Dragons later in life.
I gave up on Halloween after my little dice adventure (my friends kept shoving me in an attempt to 'roll' me, and it's really tough to get up when 3/4ths of your arms are stuck inside cardboard) and never looked back. Every year I'd fret for weeks about what to dress up as while everyone else just went as the Red Ranger again and again, tolerate all the antics of 11-year-olds hopped up on Pixie Stix for the entire evening, and then get home with a buttload of candy when I really didn't even like candy all that much. If the custom was to give out garlic bread, or meatloaf, or pornography, I'd probably be trick or treating right now, but instead I was going through an awful lot of heartache and trouble for something I didn't even like that much in the first place ("Congratulations, you've won the Boston Marathon! Here's a wet sock.").
So I stopped trick or treating, and everyone else kept trick or treating. As they got older, my classmates started to care even less about what pretended to be. By high school, half of them had ditched the notion of a costume altogether and just went trick or treating in jeans and a T-shirt, and then came back through the neighborhood a few hours later with eggs and rolls of toilet paper and baseball bats for unsuspecting pumpkins (ironically, I'd seen at least a few of these kids crying in elementary school after their pumpkins had been smashed). The other half kept up with the costumes, but they started to get dirtier. A lot of the girls who had been princesses and fairy godmothers when I was eight were now going as naughty nurses, naughty policewomen, naughty businesswomen, naughty astronauts, naughty fry cooks, naughty newpaper editors, naughty nuns, naughty bloggers, naughty UN Secretary Generals, and so on and so forth into naughty infinity. A great many of the boys would spend an afternoon shopping for tacky clothing at a thrift store and go trick or treating as pimps.*
*Fun fact about pimps: they beat destitute, emotionally fragile women with pipes if those women don't give them enough of the money they've made having sex with anonymous men who might be serial killers. Just keep that in mind next time you're trying to think of who you want to pretend to be.
Now that I'm in college, Halloween is less about trick or treating and more about getting dressed up and drinking, explaining why I'm sitting in my room writing this at 10:00 on October 31st ("No thank you, I don't like beer."). The University Housing system, in its infinite wisdom, decided that it'd be a good idea to have parents bring their toddlers into the dorms to trick or treat, and right now little kids hyped up on sugar are running up and down the halls among big kids hyped up on something different (I suspect marijuana cigarettes).
And that's what's so brilliant about Halloween: in the spirit of a holiday with origins in paganism and witchcraft, parents in a largely Judeo-Christian culture dominated by media-bred fear of the outside world are willing to take their children into a dormitory full of college students celebrating the same holiday in a very different way. On Halloween, people go out of their comfortable little houses and neighborhoods and interact with other people on a wide scale, save for certain extreme Christian sects and the occasional lonely blogger. On what other holiday do millions of people go out, talk to strangers, give candy to people they’ve never met before, and then head home again? Not on Kwanzaa, that’s for sure.
Happy Halloween, everybody! Next week’s blog will be funnier, I promise!
Truman Capps means no disrespect to those who celebrate Kwanzaa. Both of them.