The mature approach to Halloween

What’s so funny

Our daughter Katie doesn’t want to be anyone for Halloween.

At 13 she finds the whole dressing-up deal undignified, so we no

longer have a kid to take around the neighborhood. There will be no

costumed Kiralys this year.

Oh, Patti Jo and I could dress up and go to a grown-up party, but

grown-ups tend to over think Halloween and impersonate characters

like Tipper Gore, imposing subtleties on the holiday which it can’t

sustain.

The only one left in our family to dress up is Sashi, our

keeshond. Patti Jo has a weakness for animals-in-clothes humor so

Sashi usually wears a sweatshirt on Halloween and tours the

neighborhood as a “jogger.”

Sashi doesn’t care for the sweatshirt, but she likes everything

else about Halloween. The air of festivity exhilarates her, and she

loves going from house to house.

In this she is the opposite of Katie, who has always suspected

that a holiday based on knocking on a series of strange doors was

madness. On her first Halloweens she approached these doors leaning

back, as if on a tilt board.

She later found the ordeal was tolerable as long as she had a good

character to play -- a lion, say, or Sailor Moon -- and as long as a

rigid formula was observed. The door would open. She would hold her

sack out. The grown-up in the doorway would say something hearty and

she’d nod. Candy in the sack. Thanks. End of chitchat.

Standing in the doorway is all that remains for Patti Jo and me

now. We can’t very well do the neighborhood with Sashi; you can’t go

to your neighbor’s house with a dog in a sweatshirt and expect to get

candy.

I suppose the role of Grown-up in the Doorway has its merits. The

grown-up controls the bowl. He can reward the costumes he things

meritorious and stiff those sinister 14-year-old boys. He can hand

out all the Snip-Snaps and make sure the Nestle’s Crunches wind up

back in the refrigerator where they belong.

Of course I’ll have to jockey for position with Patti Jo, who also

likes the doorway role. She distributes the candy willy-nilly,

without thinking, or as she calls it, “fairly.” If she gets her way

there won’t be any Nestle’s Crunches left at all.

One of the scariest aspects of Fright Night is that danger of

running out of candy. On our first Halloween in the Top of the World

neighborhood -- prime trick-or-treat territory -- we ran out, and it

wasn’t pretty. Those kids don’t want taters and they don’t want

cotton.

But we’d rather have to load up with a few extra bags than forego

the ritual altogether. Before we moved here we spent a Halloween in a

neighborhood where no kids came by at all.

Now that was scary.

* SHERWOOD KIRALY is a Laguna Beach resident. He has written four

novels, three of which were critically acclaimed.