Halloween is fun. I enjoy costumes and dressing up. I especially like seeing all the kids come to the door in their cute costumes, while their bundled up parents encourage them to say “Trick or Treat.” While I may go on the hit list of M&M/Mars for saying it, I think Halloween can start to go away. When I say that, I don’t really mean go away entirely, but maybe it is time for it to reinvent itself. I LOVED Halloween and trick or treating when I was a kid. After all, I was a pudgy little kid (to put it mildly), so a holiday where free candy comes to those who put on a plastic mask and go to the neighbor’s doors was just right for me. But let’s face it, times have changed. When I was a kid, we also chased the mosquito truck around playing in the stream of toxins it was releasing, bought explosives at the local stand to benefit the Jaycees, and went without supervision for most of the day after we got out of school-even in 1st grade. Things are different now. More conservative families are opting out on Halloween celebrations altogether, I am merely advocating we change the holiday to get rid of the trick or treating aspect. Here are my reasons to change Halloween.
Aren’t our kids fat enough? Studies show that childhood obesity is a huge problem in America. Stack that on top of a few hundred television stations and PS3 as the most popular babysitter in America, and you have a recipe for disaster. Do we really need to have a night where we give our already under nourished, yet overweight kids a reason to chow down on thousands of empty calories? What ever happened to bobbing for apples?
Are begging and threatening really the values our kids need to learn? “Trick or Treat.” Pretty self explanatory. Give me candy or we will conduct mischief on you or your home. In today’s society, there is already ample opportunity for kids to get up to mischief. In my neighborhood, the kids rarely even wear costumes anymore-and most are way too old for this type of fun. Yet they believe that it is their right to be given free stuff, just because they have the nerve to knock on your door. We were allowed to trick or treat until about 10 or 12 years old. Every year, I am seeing high school age kids at my door. What are we really teaching these kids?
Couldn’t our money be better spent? According to an article on the University of Nebraska Omaha’s Gateway, $1.9 billion dollars is spent on candy in the Halloween season. What could we do to promote local foods, weatherize buildings, rebuild the electric grid, or feed and educate our country’s poor with nearly 2 billion dollars?
How much garbage does this holiday generate? It is estimated that we in the US buy about 598 million pounds of candy around Halloween. That is as much as nearly 150 thousand average cars weigh. Most of that candy is bought in bags (plastic) that holds a bunch of tiny little individually wrapped sweets. Some even have a couple of layers of wrapping. Add to that the enormous amount of generated waste from the store displays and trick or treating becomes a real landfill nightmare. Not to mention that costumes come in packages and that after the day, many of these costumes are thrown out, as we choose cheap stuff over rental or reuse.
I know that I sound like an old curmudgeon, but it is time for us to evolve. While I don’t relish the thought of some of the traditions of our youth going away, we need to rethink things these days. If we continue down the paths we are following, our kids won’t have much of a future to celebrate Halloween in. Besides, with the rise of juvenile diabetes, we won’t be able to give out candy soon anyhow…..
