Trick or Treat

Our first experience with trick or treaters last night. Even though we had a house in Seattle, we were not in a heavily kid-populated part of town, so our house was ghostless. I tried to hurry home last night to be there to hand out candy (Adam had instructions that if I wasn’t home yet, he was to tell they children that he was not authorized to hand out candy), but traffic was worse than I’ve ever seen it (did everyone have the same idea?) and it took me an hour to make the half hour ride home. Although I hear the worst of the traffic was on the highway to Salem. [A side note: when I called home, Adam excitedly said, “Nightmare Before Christmas is on TV!” This is his favorite movie, so I said, “That sounds like a good excuse to not read your cases.” But then when I got home, I said, “It’s not on TV! You put on the DVD!” to which he shrugged and said, “Same thing!” Um, no?] We had a massive bowl of candy, and even though, with Adam’s insistence (which I wholeheartedly agreed) I studded it with lots of chocolate, the real candy of choice last night was the Sprees. Kids with good taste! I have to say, I got a complete kick out of the really little ones. They were so cute and hesitant and bordering on terrified. They’d very carefully take one piece of candy from the bowl, and when I said, “You can take another one, too,” they’d turn and look at their mother or father and wait for their nod of approval before turning back to the bowl and very carefully selecting a second piece. There were only two batches of the greedy kids, from whom I had to physically lift the bowl away as they attempted to clean us out. I think kids over the age or nine or ten should be banned from trick or treating. I was surprised to hear (although I didn’t see any) that kids in their teens trick or treat in this part of the world. I remember the last time I trick or treated. I wasn’t going to, because as a sixth grader, I was really too old, but we were all hanging at Andrea’s house, which was in a development, and the group of us decided we really wanted the candy after all, but the whole time I was out, I just felt ridiculous.