Halloween

Last year, R sent one of the guys who works for him to pick up Halloween candy for the shop. The guy (to protect the guilty, I'm not mentioning names) came back with -- I don't even know. Off-brand, non-chocolate, like hard candies and shit. I can't imagine where he found them. There may have been a few Sweet Tarts or Smarties (US) mixed in, but on the whole it was an utterly inadmissible collection. Had I chosen to egg the shop, no jury in the world would have convicted me. This year my message to R was clear: get chocolate, or you'll never see your firstborn child.

I didn't specify type or provide rankings. Not that I couldn't; so could any 7 year-old in the country; but half the fun is eating fun size portions of candy bars you would never dream of purchasing in their natural state. Mr Goodbar -- do they even make those full size? Baby Ruth. Krackel. Butterfinger. 3 Musketeers.

This isn't a ding; I love all of those. But I can count on one hand the commercial, regular ol' types of candy bars I've bought in my life. Snickers. Kit Kat (Chunky and not). Maybe a Milky Way. Reese's. Peanut M&Ms. Never Twix. I have what some may consider an irrational aversion to Twix. They're not bad exactly. But why are there two? I mean i'll eat one if you give it to me. But I will never pick it out of the bowl on Nov 1. We just don't click, Twix and me.

In any event, in addition to gaining access to his likely only child, R this year also purchased himself a grade-A American education. Because if there's one thing that gets lost in translation, it is candy.

"Almond Joy! Fantastic! Like Bounty with a nut." No, Mounds with a nut. Don't you know the catchphrase? Don't you know how to use a semicolon? What do they teach them at these schools?

"Milky Way... Oh, that's not a Milky Way. That's a Mars Bar. What's a 3 Musketeers? That's a Milky Way!"

Reese's... Only on this side of the pond do we properly appreciate peanut butter, and so only we have made the discovery of the greatest pairing of all time, and i'm including Fred & Ginger here.

Snickers... Okay Snickers is Snickers. Sometimes you just cannot fuck with greatness. Therein lies what makes it great.

York Peppermint Patty... As R's coworker explained: "We can eat all these ourselves. They're too sophisticated for children. They don't appreciate them properly." Which is true. I've always liked them, but they're never something you'd trade for.

Because oh, did we trade. In the basement rec room of my friend Amy's house, with careful piles in front of us. If one person had to go to the bathroom while negotiations were still ongoing, the rest had to sit on their hands, not moving, watching each other for the slightest hint of perfidy. There may be honor among thieves, but trust? Not where 12 year-old girls are concerned.

We all visited the same houses of course. Our hauls should, theoretically, have been the same, or anyway roughly comparable. But there are those mixed bags where one person ends up with a Hershey's Special Dark and one person gets Reese's Pieces, and inexplicably, but luckily, there are some people who actually like gum and lollipops and will give you chocolate in exchange for them. Or Skittles, at the very least.

We drove hard bargains in that basement. I always maintained that it was alright if we went to school on Halloween -- more costume time, and things don't get going til 5 probably anyway -- but the day after should really, by all rights, be a national holiday.

But speaking of costumes. Looking back at my childhood, its times like this I realize what an impenetrable geek I was. Things that seemed awesome at the time... Well they still seem awesome, but with that little bit of head-shaking pride that a kid could have those ideas, and balls.

My first few years were uninspiring. I didn't get a vote. A cat, a clown. My first real Halloween costume was Peter Pan. I had a sword made out of cardboard wrapped in tinfoil, and I wore my father's wooly brown socks as knee boots. They picked up leaves like crazy. The pièce de résistance was the black eye a boy in my class had given me the day before.

Next I was a scuba diver. Probably in spandex, not neoprene. And I wore the flippers, which was a mistake no matter how you slice it. You cannot walk in flippers. We had a school parade around the field, and I kept getting lapped because I could only shuffle, inch by inch, while the cowboys and chefs and whatnot charged by.

My best costume ever, certainly by my parents' reckoning, and they could be right, was Charlie Chaplin. Again, not a fast mover, but doing the walk correctly, having none of my 6 year-old classmates get it, and only half my teachers, was worth it.

When I was a bit older, maybe one of my last real trick-or-treating years, I went as Santa Claus. It wasn't a very interesting costume -- probably the closest I ever came to something out of a bag -- but it was worth it every time someone opened the door and I shouted "Merry Christmas!"

More recently I've had my moments. My interpretive Two-Face was good. Annie Lennox and Seven of Nine both spot on. But my friend who always had the parties, who lived a block fom the parade on the right side and spent all year perfecting his own costume, is gone, and that's put a bit of a damper on things. I had my next good one all planned out too: Victorian lady Han Solo. But alas.

So this year I put on some stuff, got crushed in the crowd on the wrong side of the parade, saw a walking Chrysler Building and Michael Jackson holding hands with the Stay Puft Marshmallow man, and met R for dumplings in Chinatown. Then we ate too much chocolate. It could be worse.