Not About the Candy

We don’t have a chiming doorbell. We have a door knocker. So, on Halloween, we post ourselves in the living room, so we can hear the wee voices and the bitty knuckle-knocks. (Because most can’t reach–or don’t understand–the brass knocker thingy.) And we talk about stuff like Halloweens Past and Whatever Election Is Eminent. But tonight is my first Halloween since I started ginnygrams, so in my head, I have been listing my thoughts on which blog to blog:

1. The year I thought it was a good idea to hand out Halloween pencils.

2. Ginger’s second Halloween (she was only five days old for her first), when she wore a homemade baby duck costume. Heart.

3. My long-ago rant about trick-or-treaters who were most definitely not from our neighborhood.

4. Bill’s decision, this year, to be the house that hands out full-size candy bars.

5. The costume I agreed to wear to work today. (Has anyone seen my lost pride? Oh wait. Who cares? It was fun!)

How to decide? A sign from Miss Gigi. She just sent an email from the Eastern Time Zone to say that she had turned off her porch light. And that she remembered something Bill once told me, nearly 30 years ago. Because tonight she found herself handing out candy to mothers with babes in arms and to kids too big to be trick-or-treating. And she wrote how grateful she is to live in a happy, healthy, safe place.

So ding ding ding. Number 3 wins…

Back in the mid-1980s, I stomped my feet about the parents who were dropping off bunches of kids to trick or treat in our north-side neighborhood, instead of staying where they belong in their own neighborhoods. Because they were clearly not from our neighborhood. Says my husband, who was working in the thick of Humboldt Park and had side jobs in Cabrini Green, “These parents are bringing their children here, to give them a safe Halloween, to just be little kids for a while. No gangs, no guns. So give ’em all the candy we have, okay?”

More than okay.