What Has Happened To Halloween?

When I was a boy the children in grade school would dress up in their costumes after lunch on Halloween and we would all have a party. After school we would go home and get ready to go trick or treating. We were out at dusk, not glumly trudging along as they do today, we were out for all the candy we could get, we literally ran from house to house as though in a race, it was, I guess, a race for candy. Up one street and down the other we would go until our bags were about to burst.

Everyone got involved, homeowners bought all sorts of candy to give out, some people even made candied apples, of course that wouldn’t go today but back then there were few problems. Every home had their lights on, not like now where more then half the lights on any given street are off. What’s the matter with everybody today, has everyone forgotten what it’s like to have fun, to be a kid and dressing up one lousy day of the year? Have people become so cheap they can’t go out and buy candy? Have parents become so warped that they have forgotten how they use to look forward to Halloween?

When I was young the streets, on Halloween, were full of kids, even after I grew up, married and had a family of my own and took our kids out the streets were still crawling with kids scampering around from house to house, people had their lights on.

Now lets jump ahead to today. Most all lights are off, telling kids they aren’t worth a few pieces of candy just one day out of the year, the precious money it takes to bring a smile to a kids face is just to precious to part with. Parents are to lazy to get their kids ready and take them out.

A few years back, approximately ten or eleven. we would have around three hundred kids come to our door. We always bought candy bars from Costco, or some such place, to give out and would give each kid three. We had a ball going to the door and seeing the kids all dressed up in their costumes and some that were still trying to hold on to the last vestiges of their childhood, people were having fun. Then gradually, year after year the numbers began to dwindle. A couple of years back we only had about a hundred come to the door. Some of the neighbors, like me, were wondering what in the world is going, no one could come up with an answer other then it might be the parents and a great deal of selfishness from people who feel their time is just so d*** important that they can’t be bothered.

My wife and I thought that this year was going to be different, there are a lot of kids in the neighborhood, I bought four large bags of candy bars at Costco and boy oh boy I was ready for the expected onslaught. Sure enough, at 5:30pm there came up the walk four kids all dressed up. I told little Momma that it wouldn’t be long now, I was getting excited, Halloween has always been a fun time for me, for my wife also. Tick tock, the minutes went by, then an hour, what in the h*** is going on? Finally here comes two more. Stragglers like this would come around until the last two at 9:00pm. The sum total of kids was 34. Of those who came most never said thank you. I never saw a smile, never a glimmer of excitement, some were even to lazy to come up the walkway to the front door, why did they even come out, they expected for us to bring the candy to them.

Can anyone explain what has happened to Halloween? Is Halloween dying away only to become a relic in the dustbin of our memories?