BOO WHO?

 

I do not understand why, once a year, I am expected to provide a sugar rush to every kid in the neighborhood. This is the annual fall shakedown. The bonfire of the bonbons. And should I try offering these adolescent vagabonds healthy treats like diced carrots, sliced celery, a couple cheese chunks on toothpicks or, God forbid, a little rice pilaf,  rather than being thanked for saving a young heart, my house would be egged, my windows soaped, and my cat redecorated.

What these ‘Kinder Mafia” demand is pure sugar, not a mere saccharin rush. Their obsession with dextrose. fructose, glucose, lactose, sucrose and maltose is neither healthy nor reasonable. They expect me to feed their sugar habit.   Oh, sure, they dress it up in fairy costumes and go door to door chanting, “Treat or trick”. But what they really mean is "Show me the Chocolate!"   This is not the holiday the ancient Druid priests envisioned, nor the Aztec mortuary artists. It is not a holiday. It is sugar wealth redistribution, confectionery socialism straight out of the barrel of a gummy bear.

The roots of Halloween were planted long before Christians had enough saints to celebrate "All Hallowed Saint’s Day". The Aztecs were celebrating Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) even before they were speaking Spanish,  maybe 3,000 years ago.  And the Druids in Ireland were celebrating “Samhain” by carving turnip-o-lanterns,  2,500 years before they saw their first pumpkin.  "And how", you may ask, "could offerings to Mictecacihuatl, the Aztec Goddess who was still born, become individually packaged bags of M&Ms’ handed out to a skeleton named Debbie or Bobby?  And I will answer you, ‘Only in a world where the love child of Salvador Dali and Ma Barker is allowed to design holidays, that’s where!

This is the night for hyperventilation and hypertension - when the line between the dead and the not-really-alive (also known as Donald Trump) becomes fuzzy, and everyone grows concerned about ghosts, spooks, ghouls and zombies entering our world.  Call it the invasion of the Fox News hosts.

But its common knowledge that ghosts can not manipulate physical objects. So they can only harm you psychologically, meaning Scientologists  are safe since they don’t believe in anything that might hint at L.Ron Hubbard's level of insanity.  And nobody should be afraid of “spooks” because once you speak a spook’s name they are “spooken for” and thus rendered harmless; which is what Dick Cheney did to the spook Valerie Plame.

Now Dick Cheney was a real live ghoul, one of  those creatures who revel in death and horror and who keep coming back to life again - usually on Fox News - the network staffed by brain dead zombies. Rupert Murdoch's invention is the perfect example of how we are terrified of all the wrong things in this life and even in death.

I cannot imagine Rupert Murdock and Fox News banshees  will cease being such soul sucking terror mongers just because they eventually pass beyond the veil of death. Hell, they will just be getting started! And their behavior proves they don't believe in any divine retribution, since they only believe they themselves are divine. 

Yes, on Thursday,  31 October,  I will be answering my door wearing three levels of face masks and with vaccine enriched blood, bearing a bowl filled with tribute, because I don’t want to spend half of November pulling toilet paper out of my rain gutters and the possibly December, lying prone with a toilet paper roll shoved in my eye socket.   However, we could rather be calling this Halloween as  "Reformation Day",  when, in 1546, Martin Luther didn't actually nailed his “95 Things I Hate About The Pope” to the front door of the Wittenberg Castle Church.  He was was later charged with deformation of church intellectual property. But I diverse...

So, logically, children could be going door to door, calling, “Treat or I’ll nail your butt to the door, you papist low life, and, oh, by the way have you got any Jews hiding in here?”  A bit hard to see children squeezing candy out of that transaction.  So I guess we were lucky we got the screwed up jawbreaker, mini-Snickers holiday we did get, and not an endless election season that lasts four long painful years and gets won by the twitter ghouls.

The truth (as if that ever mattered about holidays) is that Martin Luther defiantly nailing his arguments to the church door was probably no more real than George Washington chopping down a cheery tree. Neither thing was real. And neither are ghosts or ghouls.  And this year I greatly doubt you will see any  Martin Luther costumes on Halloween Night.   I did see a George Washington once, but that was so long ago the costume was probably made in the United States.

Last year Americans spent over $10 billion on this mish-mash of a holiday. Almost all of our black and orange fix, like cocaine, is provided by overseas suppliers who have no other connection to us other than this holiday, and although that kind of chump change would barely support Elon Musk for a month, it does work out, on average, to over $100 per American family each year. Our family is not spending anywhere near that much, so I figure Elon must be spending like a billion to make up for what us po' folks aren't spending anymore - call them  the ghoul creators.

About three out of four pet owners even buy costumes for their cats and dogs, lizards or birds.  PetSmart’s  Beetlejuice costume costs fourteen dollars and ninety seven cents!. 

Or if you wish to humiliate your pet for cheap you can get pizza head piece for a lousy $5.00.  Not bad for a costume inspired by the subway pizza rat. At PetCo, for a mere five spot,  you can force your compliant guinea pig or bunny rabbit into a bumble bee costume.  Although I have no idea what you would dress up your bumble bee to be.  It all gives a whole new meaning to the term "Puttin' on the dog".  Still, this canine costume capitalism is surprising. considering that dogs and skeletons would seem to be a natural costume combo. And once the holiday was over you would not have to pack up the costume -  you just let Rover bury it.

But as a nation we seem determined to spend as much as possible on this “dead holiday thing”.  In a normal year we used to put 2 million pirates (mostly boys, and far outnumbering the original pirates) on the streets Halloween night, along with 4 million princesses - mostly girls and about equal to the number of real princesses) with adults to follow behind them, as back-up muscle. At the ring of the door bell we older folks, cowering in our homes, should be armed a can of heavy duty Lysol and a half-empty bowl of bite sized Three Musketeers, and hope that is enough to buy us protection for another year.

And that is where all smart adults should be on Halloween night, dreading the sound that fills the night with horror and chills the bones; “Trick or treat, trick or treat, give us something good to eat. Or else.”  Yes, Trick or Treat, and bon appetit, my fellow cowering masses. And if you survive this night, you have just a few days until the next real horror ; election day 2024, when we say goodbye to our democracy.  Boo Who? Boo You, that's who! And boo me, too.

- 30 –