Trick or Treat

Halloween has arrived and departed.  It’s one of the holidays I greatly relish because it has no significance.  It’s not like Easter/Passover or New Year’s or Independence Day.  All those holidays have deeper and more meaningful significance.  Halloween, with its rich traditions of pagan rituals, celebratory bonfires, the opening of graves so the dead can walk in the world of the living, is so out of place in the modern world.  Halloween now has become an excuse to dress up and extort candy from the neighbors.

And I love it.

For one, it’s acceptable to visit with the kids who come to your door demanding a candy tribute. That’s not anything you can do at the mall or a city playground without looking for trouble.  You can joke with strangers who walk up your driveway and laugh with them about their children. 

The older kids, whose costumes consist of their ordinary clothes and a plastic bag, smirk when they get their candy.  They think they are putting one over on you.  Little do they know we’re wise to them and did the same thing 50 (!) years ago.  The joke's on them if they think they’ve discovered something original.

It was suggested I should dress in a ghillie suit with a sniper rifle (toy, of course) to hand out candy. 

Why?

That way when I get the challenge “Trick or treat!” I could choose trick and offer to give them a head start with the advice to zig-zag. That seems a little too aggressive and probably not scary to kids raised on handsome, shirtless vampires.

I don't know about you, but I find this pretty scary!!

Best of all, I get to carve a jack-o-lantern.  I described my idea to my wife and got the old, “He’s just flapping his gums again.”  I don’t care.  We joke about pumpkin guts and draw sketches on the newspaper work surface of the eyes we want  before we select one.  It doesn’t matter how little carving talent you have, the pumpkins always seem to turn out properly spooky.

This year I turned to my S&W HRT Team knife (trust me, no HTR uses this knife) to insure my jack-o-lantern turned out right.  I didn’t carve with it.  I stuck it in its ear.  Anyone who asked about the knife, I told ‘em “Yeah, that’s my team knife.  I won’t need it until later tonight so I thought I‘d get a little use out of now.”  Most of them left wondering about that.  Nobody returned their candy, so I guess I didn’t scare anyone too much.

Ouch!  That's going to leave a mark.

My pumpkin carving is highly dependent on three things: a black magic marker that can be scrubbed off with Goo Gone, a stout pewter sugar scoop my wife doesn’t use for sugar, and her father’s Marttiini fish knife. 

There's nothing like a thin blade for cutting a face into a pumpkin.

I’ve tried other cutting implements, including a potato peeler and chain saw.  The peeler worked so–so, the chain saw not at all.  It was, however, remarkably therapeutic and satisfying to use the chain saw.  I recommend it to any of you after a tough day at work.