Give Her the Candy and No One Gets Hurt
Posted on October 31, 2010 Posted by John Scalzi 26 Comments
Athena on “Beggar’s night,” which is a couple of days before Halloween so that kids aren’t running around on the streets on the same night adults are going to Halloween parties and then driving about stupidly. Or so they tell me; personally I prefer my Halloween on Halloween. Either way, the procurement of candy was made, and with a serious “give me candy” face such as above, I doubt there was much resistance. Athena looks devilishly fabulous in any event.
World Fantasy Convention is winding down; there’s the award ceremony this afternoon and then it’s home to the family and pets. I’m looking forward to that.
Now if she can just learn to do the demon voice from The Exorcist you’ve got it made!
Nice costume.
“so that kids aren’t running around on the streets on the same night adults are going to Halloween parties and then driving about stupidly.”
That sucks. People need to chill on the booze and partying and remember that Halloween isn’t as much about getting wasted and slutty nurse costumes as TRICK OR TREATING. That is to say It’s For Kids, and your role as an adult is to facilitate the trick or treating.
I grew up in Pennsylvania where Halloween was whenever your county decided to have it — Thursday Nights usually — and I live now in a place where Halloween is on Halloween.
I enjoy the latter.
Most Halloween parties I’ve been to have been on a Friday or Saturday night, regardless of the holiday (because no one wants to head to work on Monday with a splitting headache and makeup that won’t quite come off).
Btw, Athena’s eye makeup is excellent.
My theory is that Trick-or-Treat on the weekends doesn’t get in the way of parties so much as get in the way of the Friday and Saturday night football games.
Very nice look. I’m sure the implied “…or else” was made more emphatic by that ambulance sitting there.
Hmm, I would have thought kids trick or treat from dusk (which is around 6 pm here) till like 9 or 10 pm, while the adults getting wasted doesn’t even get started till 10 pm (the party I went to was just gearing up at midnight when I left). Plus, the kids can trick or treat on a sunday night no problem, but what grownups want to stay up late and get wasted and then go to work the next morning? Everyone I know had Halloween parties on Friday and Saturday, but expects the kids to go trick or treating on the actual day of Halloween. (In my building they are organizing kids to trick or treat from noon to 6 pm, which I think is ridiculously early in the day for trick or treating, even for toddlers.)
We do Halloween between 6 and 8 pm today. That’s another way to keep the kids away from drunk “grown-ups”. It’s also easier on the candy givers.
The political candidates at the local level will be out tonight. Most of the candy givers just wait outside, so we are easy targets to be campaigned at. I can imagine Rand Paul doing that in Louisville tonight. I suppose he will be pretending to be a board certified ophthalmologist, as usual.
That is a seriously awesome make-up job around Athena’s eyes.
Darn! I screwed up the HTML on that last post. Sorry.
Re: Ben
“That sucks. People need to chill on the booze and partying and remember that Halloween isn’t as much about getting wasted and slutty nurse costumes as TRICK OR TREATING. That is to say It’s For Kids, and your role as an adult is to facilitate the trick or treating.”
What?! Adults need fun time too. Halloween is a perfect excuse to dress up as something silly, relax and have a good time. I don’t see dressing up in ghoulish costumes in late October as the exclusive domain of kids. Why should it be?
Or, as one of the characters on *Glee* said the other night, “Give Me CHOCOLATE, or I’ll cut you!”
Love those flaming eyes!
“The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world she didn’t exist.” ;)
@ Dave H – ambulance? I thought that was her personal trailer.
@Matt: I grew up in Pennsylvania too, and live there currently (southeastern corner, to be precise), and Halloween has always been on Halloween in my community. I’m aware that there are other areas that do it differently, but I don’t know where they are. 6:00 to 8:00 has always been the rule, now and as a kid. After 8:00, it’s just “hoodlums,” as my mother calls them — teenagers without costumes on just going door-to-door because they can. I think that’s well out of the way of any adult parties.
For the record, kids who come to my door without costumes on get those tiny boxes of Sun-Maid raisins instead of candy. I buy ’em special, just for that purpose.
Who did the make-up. It’s really amazing.
Dusk/suppertime till mid-evening has been the standard for the kids pretty much everywhere I’ve lived, too. The last couple of places have been in fairly large security-door apartment buildings, and to avoid having kids (both residents and neighbors) wandering around the building, the management for several years has asked for donations of candy etc. from tenants, propped the front door open and thrown a sort of open-house Halloween party from mid-afternoon till around suppertime.
As for parties (and driving), they tend to get started earlier in the evening here, probably because we have two largish universities here (Laurier and U. of Waterloo) with a corresponding relatively large student population. Back in the days when I was driving taxi weekends, and after Oktoberfest lost its attraction to tourists (the college kids pretty much took over and turned it into a drink-till-you-puke fest), I was surprised to find that the weekend closest to Halloween, with its parties, had become the best nights of the year for business, even busier than New Year’s Eve.
Beggar’s Night, where I grew up, was Devil’s Night, which in nicer communities meant toilet papering your friends’ front yards, and in not-so-nice communities was an excuse for vandalism.
Where I grew up (north suburb of Chicago), Beggar’s Night was always October 30, and it just meant there were two nights available for trick-or-treating instead of just one. Which was convenient, because it meant I could trick-or-treat for UNICEF one night, and for candy on the other.
I grew up in Nevada, where Halloween used to mean no school! Of course, that is because October 31 is also Nevada Day (which seems an oddly appropriate day for Statehood in this particular case and given the election shenanigans that are currently going on). It was, however, ruined years ago when the powers that be decided that it was much more convenient to just move the holiday to the closest Monday. Great for three day weekends, but sucks as kids can no longer gloat that Halloween is a school holiday.
Alas, Hallow e’en isn’t a big thing Down Under. But tomorrow is Melbourne Cup Day, which is a holiday, and which marks the official start of Party Season. So, yay! Cop Day will be interesting this year, as we’ve just this weekend had a month’s worth of rain. The poor fashionistas are going to be freezing!
That’s a very “emo devil child” thing she has goin’ on there… ;->
@brian mac
yeah, i grew up in central PA. Nice place, if not a little backwards sometimes.
My brother is over in Philly. Things seem a little more open concerning Halloween thereabouts.
Huh. Normally I think she looks more like her mother, but here she looks more like you, John.
I think it’s the horns.
We’re in a new, much smaller town, and ‘Beggar’s Night’ was Friday. I, too, prefer Halloween on Halloween, but I admit that it was nice to have a designated time for all the kids to come around (5:30-7:30, with a few stragglers after), and the costumes were great.
I’ll give her recommendations, but she can buy her own damn candy.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/30793789@N07/4062445129/in/set-72157622706156282/
is the costume I went with both last year and this year, and the one I plan to wear when Sancutary City Rockies (also known as “Denver” by the dwindling majority of us who habla Ingles gets its dirty bomb and/or the Chinese or Putin decide to take out our ICBM impact prediction radar array at Buckley AFB in advance of the Big Party.
It’s odd. I seem to recall that the whole idea of Trick or Treat was to be ‘scary’ and ‘extort’ candy from the neighbors. Where I live now, they practically throw it at you before you can do your ‘thing’, if you have one. I guess this is common – it’s how it’s shown on the Charlie Brown Halloween Special (with extra rocks!), but it’s disappointing. I guess the houses were more widely spaced where I lived when I was little, so each house was a bigger deal – you’d approach and actually do something a little scary or funny, talk a little bit, get some candy and/or UNICEF donations. When neighboring houses are in physical contact, taking the time to do that would really cut into your range, and thus your haul.