Two lame things that happen on Halloween

This may seem petty, and it is, but it also really isn't

It’s November 1st so this is a little late to the party and you won’t be able to use this advice until next year. But since the chocolate is still fresh on everyone’s teeth I figured it can’t hurt to share two of my major pet peeves about the otherwise-magnificent holiday of Halloween:

1. Older kids trick-or-treating. The trick-or-treating cutoff age is a perennial debate, particularly among baby boomers. I think 60% of Facebook traffic now is attributable to boomers yelling back and forth at each other about this. Here’s the answer: If you’re over 10 years old, you shouldn’t trick-or-treat. That’s a good cutoff age. You might point out that there’s not a whole lot of difference between, say, 10 and 11, but there’s also not a whole lot of difference between, say, 20 and 21, yet at the former you can’t buy beer and at the latter you can, and that’s perfectly fine. You just have to pick an age and stick with it.
   
   Here’s the gist of it: Halloween is the one holiday of the year in which most young children’s only innately marketable skill (their limitless energy) pairs perfectly with their most innately driven desire (getting candy). Halloween is like the planets aligning for little kids: They want candy and they can get it and all they have to do is walk around a neighborhood for it. It’s the only day of the year when little children experience absolutely no mismatch between the way they are and the way the world is structured.
   
   Older kids are not so disposed as this. The older you get, the less important candy is to your life; and if you want some, you can go out and mow a lawn or walk a dog or do whatever and easily earn enough money to satisfy your diminished cravings. In effect, older kids who go trick-or-treating are robbing younger children of a valuable and unique natural resource that the older kids could easily get elsewhere. Not to get too heavy-handed about it, but it’s a bit like stealing the handicap space in a mall parking lot when you’re not handicapped. Someone else has a much stronger and more persuasive claim to that than you do.
   
   On Facebook and NextDoor, the ceaseless cry from 70-year-old retirees usually runs along the lines of: “We shouldn’t force kids to grow up so quickly! Let them be young again for a night!” Um, no. This is stupid. Nobody is forcing anyone to grow up quickly. There are many many fun and enjoyable and age-appropriate things for 14-year-olds to do that don’t involve partaking in a holiday clearly and understandably meant for younger children. Stop patronizing teenagers and assuming that they’ll be heartbroken if they don’t get a bag of free candy once a year. Expect more of them than that.
   

2. Driving kids from block to block. You see this more and more as the years go by, at least in densely residential areas: Kids going from house to house while their parents putter along the street in the car. At the end of the block the kids get in and they drive 25 feet to the next block. It’s pathetic: The parent apparently can’t bring himself to walk along with the kids for a few hours, and the kids learn the sparkling virtue of 21st century laziness. Everyone loses.
   
   I like to refer to Halloween as a “working holiday.” Perhaps no other celebration on the calendar so comprehensively melds physical and logistical exertion with material payoff. This is just part of it: You work, you walk, you beat the pavement, you cover every inch, and you reap the considerable rewards of doing so. Having your parents drive you around the neighborhood, however tertiary the driving itself actually is, absolutely divorces the observance from its richly symbolic trappings. It’s like someone buying a catered turkey for Thanksgiving. What, you couldn’t put the work in one day of the year? It’s lame.
   
   It also destroys one of the best secondary features of Halloween, which is parents bantering with homeowners and other parents out on the walk. There’s rich communal stuff there. Driving also gives you less time with your kids—you’re stuck on the street for most of it while they’re up on the sidewalk. And you just look like a total couch potato doing it. Lame, lame, lame.

Other than that stuff it’s one of the best days of the year! I hope yours was as good as mine.