It's "trunk or treat" time again in our neighborhood. The doorstep invitation encourages us to fill our car trunk with candy, drive to the LDS wardhouse up the street and park in the lot. Then we open the trunk and wait for the little costumed goblins to run up, fill their treat bags and move to the next car.
It's simple. It's safe. It's boring.
Two years ago, when we first were invited to "trunk or treat," I had a good laugh. It wasn't so much from the humor, but the absurdity of it all. I mean, I'm down with the whole security concern for kids on Halloween. What with the occasional report of candy that's been tampered with, or of creeps prowling neighborhoods for unsupervised children, it's definitely a time for extra caution.
But all of these heavily orchestrated, adult-managed excuses for Halloween fun have gone too far. It's time for kids to take back the night.
"Trunk or treat" nights are in vogue all over Utah, I'm told. They follow in the older tradition of shopping malls and city halls opening their doors to trick or treaters. Last week, a Utah homebuilder even advertised Halloween treats for costumed kids who accompany their parents on a tour of a model home. Aargh.
It's safe all right, but where is the joy? It's one thing to rally for safety on behalf of kids. It's something else when adults succeed at squeezing the last drops of fun from Halloween - discouraging the sheer and shameless glee of roving along dark sidewalks on a chilly, starlit night in a perfect costume that took weeks to dream up.
Not so long ago, grown-ups understood this holiday. It isn't that they were blind to questions of safety. The mothers in the neighborhood of my youth were like a flock of hens with chicks zipping around their feet. They watched out for us, and especially on Halloween night. Hardly different from the moms who populate my neighborhood today.
There is no shortage of Halloween safety tips for parents who really think they need them. You've heard them all: Masks should have eyeholes large enough for an actual set of eyes. Costumes should fit well enough to prevent tripping. How dumb are we, anyway?
The safety lists proliferate on the Internet, in newspapers and city newsletters. My own favorites come from www.halloween-safety.com, including this: "Watch the candy intake when they get home. Too much can lead to stomachaches and indigestion."
No, it seems the Halloween tradition has been all but co-opted by adults who want to micromanage children's holiday fun in the same way they oversee play dates, team sports and sleepovers. Life must be neatly arranged, right down to overscheduled soccer and baseball time to the perfectly themed birthday party. Put a group of preschoolers in a room together these days and they look a little baffled-until three sets of parents swoop in and "teach" them how to play.
Perhaps the urge to engineer Halloween, like picking the perfect kindergarten, has become just another measure of modern parenting. There must be a right and a wrong way to do it. A parent wouldn't want to mess it up.
But what the kids really want - if anyone cared to ask them - is to run through the neighborhood wired on sugar, if for just one night a year.
And you can bet their plans wouldn't include an open car trunk in a parking lot.
hmullen@sltrib.com
