Halloween

Irish123​(dom male) • Oct 27, 2023

Holloween ( Samhain) is big in my home. We carve pumpkins, decorate for the season, make a special meal, and wife/sub participate in a special ritual marking the end of of the harvest season. We also commemorate those we have lost in our lives.

SnowMinx​(sub female){Owned} • Oct 27, 2023

That's so interesting. Thank you for posting. It sounds like a special evening.

Sweet Ginger​(sub female){⚓ } • Oct 27, 2023

I like Halloween I enjoy the flavors: pumpkin spiced goodies, scented candles and ever year I get a "Cinderella pumpkin " it's now a traditional favorite..i enjoy taking a brisk walk through my neighborhood, seeing all the decorations..pretty cool, how some are so creative...not planning on totally dressing up this year. Just my kitty ears and I'm set to go! ^..^

Six Foot Four • Oct 29, 2023

Trunk or Treat is a fairly new development in the US. I hadn’t heard about it until this year, but apparently it's 'a thing' started by churches in the Nineties & put on by an organization, be it a church or Parent Teacher Association or other community group. I've got friends in other places who rave about them but honestly, it kind of weirds me out. As IW mentioned, it's pretty much the opposite of the whole 'don't take candy from strangers' thing. I drove by one advertised on a big commercial-grade sign the other day, and I was Very Excited. I called the folks in my world who love it to let them know I’d seen one, but it’s not a thing I’ll be participating in.

When I was a child, all the kids dressed and most of the parents did too. One parent takes the kids trick-or-treating and the other stays home and hands out candy. It was an opportunity for moms and later their kids to show off. You dress your family and home and compete in the most polite of ways. The best costumes are almost always homemade. As a young man I certainly appreciated the costume parties; most gals go as some flavor of slutty and often coordinate their partner’s costume with their own. As an adult…well. I have Opinions.

These days much of the ‘magic’ of Halloween and many other holidays has been lost due to commercialization. Rather than candlelight illuminating delightfully carved individual pumpkins and paper bags and all sorts of other things, it’s large inflatable decorations you stick on your front lawn and e-z yard illuminations that project an image or several onto your house. Even the tiny pumpkins and other unique things folks used to light their driveways to beckon you towards their house are now replaced by plastic lantern yard stakes with LEDs in practically whatever shape you desire. It’s a lot easier to spend X dollars on the internet and have costumes & decorations shipped to your door than it is to spend weeks or months planning and organizing and creating. It’s a lot less work. But to me, it’s less fun.

Halloween is an important part of the changing of the seasons. First you cut a circle out of the top of a pumpkin, then you scoop out the insides, then you carve the pumpkins, and lastly you make & bake pumpkin pie with what you scooped out with your own two hands. ‘Pumpkin Pie Season’ lasts from whenever you start carving pumpkins in October until sometime in December when you run out of Thanksgiving leftovers. Pumpkin pie is a seasonal dish to me; one enjoyed for a portion of the year and very rarely afterwards. With the advent of canning you can buy pumpkin pie filling practically anytime, but I refuse to.

Halloween starts the holiday ramp-up; next comes Thanksgiving, the US harvest festival and then comes Christmas. There will be Turkey and Cranberry Sauce and casseroles and green beans and root vegetables and some sort of Vegetable Soup. There are decorating opportunities for all of these; there are Expectations. My slave made a big deal out of all of these and I sort of miss it. *smiles wistfully*

Miki • Oct 29, 2023

I like Halloween as a part of Autumn which is my favorite of the four seasons, especially after a hot, humid (read "shitty") summer.

I don't do anything for All Hallows itself any more though. I loved it as a kid and did some zany shit in college, more on the "trick" side of course, but these days I am a sideline observer. Also I'm in an apartment with no exterior doors. I exit into a main hallway, descend some stairs and leave the house through the front door.

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"Trunk or Treat"-- I only first learned of that this year, but I read that it was started in the 1990s by various church groups to take the devil out of the evening, or at least reduce the perceived evil influence of Old Scratch.

Personally, as I don't really do anything for Halloween I guess I don't have a dog in this fight but still, my reaction would be

"Meh. If you dig it do it."

But having everything located in one well-lit parking lot seems to take the zing out of it.

I can remember going down my street and one street over on each side and ringing doorbells, using the knocker or if neither bell nor knocker was present I'd just pound on the door with my fist. They usually were pretty quick to answer when I or a companion did that.

It was plenty safe. Groups of my fellow little bastards everywhere accompanied by parents with flashlights, who stand at the end of the driveways and let the rug rats do their thing.

Now with Trunk and Treat I see it as "canned Halloween"--- Pretty soon might as well just dress up the runts, have them step out on the porch and just stuff their bags right there in the house. Then just call them back in. They "Oooo" and "Ahh" take the costumes off and go back to their phones.

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And I would miss the "trick" part... Like, on our street of course there was a house owned by an asshole dentist and the prick would give out toothbrushes. What a freakin' buzz kill, that dude.

I didn't punk his ass every year but one or two years it was the good old standby of tossing rolls of ass paper all over the trees in his front yard, applying wheel bearing grease (or similar) to his front and back door handles, cool shit like that.

And the last year I "hit" the guy was a rather warm Halloween and he had the front windows open and I lobbed about 2 or 3 of those little glass stink bombs on the wall. (I carried those every year. In fact I still have some in one of my kitchen drawers) "Ya Never Know!!

Anyway I didn't stick around long, but I did turn and see the guy very swiftly shutting those windows and then the front door flew open.

"Later, dude!" I thought to myself


Back to Trunk or Treat, you can also be selective. One can simply pick out the Reese's cups or Hershey bars (no almonds please) . and leave the lousy candy for the kids who arrive later.

With traditional trick or treat you're stuck with what they give you, usually shit like tootsie rolls or that ubiquitous fucking candy corn.. Well, I suppose those are economical in that someone somewhere has saved the leftover tootsie rolls and candy corn to hand out next year. The little monsters would never know the difference because that crap will stay the same clear through to Doomsday.

Blech!

SnowMinx​(sub female){Owned} • Oct 29, 2023

Miki your writing is amazing and a pleasure to read.

Miki • Oct 29, 2023

Ohh you're too kind. I got this way mostly from decades of voracious reading.

Sprinkle in a healthy dose of my witty nature (A.K.A my incorrigible inner smart-ass) and voila.

Also, as a few in here already know, it helps that writing / reading is pretty much my only way of communicating. I can sign but I'd much rather not. Besides just about everyone I deal with on my day-to-day wouldn't know what the hell I meant so that "skill" is about as functional as a cordless garden hose. I read lips fairly well but that's a pain in the ass when I'm in a restaurant or something. Invariably there are people several booths down having a weirdo conversation and I have to force myself to look away before the one(s) facing me figure out I know what screwy shit they just said.

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As for being "mean" to our dear neighborhood dentist, The ass paper-in-the-trees is older than Hell and in hindsight it wasn't very nice, but hell, I was 10 years old or so and besides my late sister put me up to it. It wasn't often, but she occasionally felt the need to fill the role of "the evil twin".

EDIT: "Better late than never"--- I truly hope there aren't any dentists on this site who read the previous post. Alas I wouldn't be too much of a surprise. Almost all dentists are sadistic monsters.

LordofPain56 • Nov 1, 2023

I've never heard of the trunk-or-treat thing either. But in the past 5 years or so, Parents have been driving their kids thru neighborhoods around here. The kids jump out of the cars and run to the front porch where the porch lights are on. People are inside ready with large bowls of candy to give out.
When this started (I call it "Halloween drive-by"), hehe, I quit turning my porch light on and closed up the house so they would think nobody was home.
But I used to be one of those who would go out the week before and spend nearly $60 just for candy to give away on Halloween night. And rarely had anything left when the night was over.
Biden closed down the mill here a few years ago, and trick-or-treaters are far and few between now, even the drive-byers have drastically decreased. Man, they've not only killed the economy here, they've killed Halloween too.

LordofPain56 • Nov 1, 2023

OMG, guys, look at this,....Miki is turning into a writer!!! Miki, are you sick or something?
BTW, what's wrong with tootsie rolls? Okay it is junk candy, but I liked them as a kid, so I used to get packages of them to give away along with bite-sized Snickers bar and a pack of gummy bears in each kids bag.
It used to be fun to see what the kids had for costumes, some were handmade from home.
One year, there was a wicked witch that showed up dressed in her homemade black crepe paper, low-cut costume with black crepe-paper mini-skirt. She was about 16 years old, had a well made-up face with black lips and mascara. She was well-stacked, had long black hair and had a pretty face.
I opened the door and my lower jaw dropped to the floor.

SnowMinx​(sub female){Owned} • Nov 1, 2023

Happy Halloween everyone. Hope it was a naughty fun one .