The real meaning of Halloween

            This post is a little after the fact, but I felt inspired…

We tend to forget the true meaning of Halloween as we grow older.  My five-year-old reminded me again this year what it’s really all about.

It’s not about the costumes.  At her age, there’s no competition among peers to see who has the best costume.  Just slap on a mask and go! 

            It’s not about the thrill of being scared.  After visiting a Halloween costume store last year with our daughter, we quickly learned after a few sleepless nights that this will never happen again.

            It’s not about the Halloween school events – the bobbing for apples (do people still do that?!), the best-costume competitions, and the much underappreciated haunted classroom tour.

            No, Halloween isn’t about the thrill of being scared, dressing up in a costume, or even having a half-day off at school.  What is it all about?  It’s about the loot.  Everything else is all fun and good, but it all comes down to the night’s candy haul.  There is only one day of the year when complete strangers will open up their homes to kids and load heaps of candy into their greedy little hands.  All they have to say is “trick-or-treat.”  That’s Halloween.

My child and her loot... soon to be locked away!

            I got to re-live that again this year, as I took my daughter around our neighbourhood.  West Regina at 8:00 pm on October 31 – for me, a farm boy, this is the big leagues.  It’s at this point in the night when homeowners start to literally shovel the candy out onto their doorsteps.  In a neighbourhood that typically doesn’t have a lot of trick-or-treaters, it’s a bonanza.  We’re talking wads of candy.  And my daughter knew it.  She couldn’t get enough of it.  Even though, in her little subconscious, she knew her stringent parents would lock most of that candy away soon after, she wanted more.  We had only to hit ten houses before her candy pail was ready for a dump and re-load.  Five more houses and she would have enough candy for herself (and her parents) for the rest of the year.

This is much different than when I grew up.  When I was a kid, we had to work hard for our loot. There were no handfuls of candy plopped into our bags.  You had to build your cache one Tootsie Roll at a time.  If you happened to get a bag of chips, you had hit the jackpot.  There were no bags of candy and toys.  This was Halloween, for goodness sake, not Christmas!  We walked through blizzards, through five-foot snow banks, through -30 degree wind chills.  The fake blood painted on our faces would turn into real blood, painfully pealing the skin off our tender cheeks.  But we would move onward, visiting every single house in Laird, in hopes of an even greater haul than last year.

            We live in different times, but the quest is still the same – to fill that pillow case full of tooth-decaying sugary goods faster than ever before.

            That’s what Halloween is all about.