Halloween freedoms, Christmas restrictions

By Conor Lee

I've never been a big fan of Christmas. Sure, you get tons of presents, and my parents were never slouches when it came to giving. I remember one Christmas when we couldn't even walk around the tree, there were so many gifts. And it wasn't the kind of deal where they were trying to make up for not being there or for hitting us occasionally. They just really liked to give us stuff.

Yeah, I really loved the bikes, guitars, chemistry starter kitsâ€"â€"and I know that my siblings will probably disagree with me about thisâ€"â€"but Christmas always just felt obligatory. Have some fun shopping for your kids, bake some cookies, decorate the house, wrap the presents, push the dog out from under the tree where he'll drink up all the water and kill the tree and then open the next door on the little house with decorated rooms for every day in the month of December.

Call me the Grinch, but all of my Christmas memories have that dreary, soft-focus feel to them. All propped up like the picture portraits of great-uncle Houndsooth Slattery and wrapped in layers of multi-colored cellophane, garnished with notes from Santa Claus and Little Baby Jesus.

Now, Halloween, that's a holiday you could really get into. You got to dress up in crazy costumes, like dead people, the hottest current pop star, werewolves, Catholic school girls, sports heroes or just about anything your little sugar-greedy, sucrose-starved hearts desire.

Then you could walk around the neighborhood and all those neighbors, the ones that were always busy raking leaves with a gas blower, smiling out from between giant red ear-muffs, or scraping the crusted bird droppings off their mini-vans, would just open their doors and give you handfuls of candy. As much as you could grab. Some people even left huge mixing bowls filled to the brim out on their doorsteps so they wouldn't have to get up and go to the door.

Halloween was great. Except for the occasional elderly Mrs. Hansons down the street who would usually just stare out at you from behind lace curtains as you rode your bike past her house. But tonight she would open her door and stare at you for a few seconds, trying to figure out why in the world were there were five boys dressed as hookers in women's wigs and torn-up clothes ringing my doorbell at 8 p.m. on Thursday? "Trick-or-TREAT!" you would yell, and then, suddenly, a bell would sound and start a rat running which knocked over a candle that burnt the rope that dropped the weight that hit the egg against the frying pan that made them realize what the hell you were doing in their doorway with a bag full of candy at 8 o'clock at night.

And then they would turn around and waddle through the green shag carpet past imitation baroque coffee tables drowning in dust and into the back room where they would return with ginger snaps that would make your gums bleed if you actually had the guts to eat them.

I remember when I would bring my sack full of trophies back home and my brother and sister and I would dump them out on the dinner table and trade the candy. Somehow, my sister and I always left happy, but my brother, the youngest of the three, would just blink his big, brown, impassive eyes at you when the logistics of my 5 Smarties, one lime Dum-Dum and box of Boston Baked Beans came up against his 3 finger-sized Snickers, 5 multi-flavored Warheads, and a handful of Nerds.

"OK, look, I know it looks like less but that's just because they're all stacked up on top of each other." I spread them out over the table top with a swipe of my hand. "See? I told you yours was more."

I loved Halloween. God, I remember sitting in class, each leg independently convulsing under the desk with anticipation, my whole pre-teen mind focused solely on that second hand dragging its way around to the top of the clock. For the next few days I would eat so much candy that I would have to sit down and watch "X-Men" until that sharp buzzing in my stomach smoothed itself away and I could eat some more.

But in the end, if you think about it too hard, you'll realize that Halloween really wasn't all that different from Christmas. I mean, it was like they took all the best parts out of Christmas, threw away the rest, granulized it and put it in little paper straws so you could rip off the top, lean your head back and shake it all onto the back of your tongue, where it would all dissolve in 3 seconds and leave your mouth with that citrus taste that didn't come close to satisfying you but just made you want to search desperately through a bag of empty wrappers to find just one more.