Spooky noises
alloween isn’t really a thing here. It keeps trying to be a thing (largely led by the retail industry, I suspect), but it never quite makes it. For a start, it’s the wrong time of year – the days are getting longer, and warmer, so there’s nothing at all spooky about the evenings (especially as it’s still daylight at the time most kids of trick or treating age are allowed to be out at night). And because we don’t have a tradition of trick or treating as a family event (Halloween definitely wasn’t a thing when most parents were growing up – it was just something that you saw in American TV programmes), all you get is a few random groups of kids in half-hearted costumes (or more likely than not, not dressed up at all) going door-knocking in the hopes of free lollies.
Which makes for an annoying conundrum every year. If I lived in somewhere like America that does Halloween properly, then I’d put a big effort into it – wear a costume and decorate the front door and have appropriately themed lollies to hand out. Or if (as it was 20 years ago) I knew that nobody bothers with Halloween, I would just ignore it completely. But as it is, I don’t know whether to stop off at the supermarket on the way home to buy some lollies to have on hand just in case (going on past years, it’s about a 50% chance whether I’ll get any trick or treaters), and risk ending up stuck with them all at the end of the night (and it’s not even like I really like the kind of lollies that I’d buy for kids anyway, so I can’t even think of the leftovers as a bonus treat for myself). But if I don’t buy any, and kids do knock on my door, then I’ll feel bad about sending them away empty handed.
Of course, if I’d been organised, I could have solved this problem by handing out books instead, but I still haven’t found a reliable source of cheap books for bookcrossing purposes (and I forgot Halloween was coming up anyway), so my supply of children’s books has dwindled to almost nothing, and none of what I’ve got left is Halloween themed.
Maybe I’ll just go to a movie tonight instead. If I’m not at home when the trick or treaters call, then problem solved! 🙂