The Great Pumpkin
I know it’s bad when I get down to the Tootsie Rolls. Like an alcoholic drinking Listerine, that is my signal that my post-Halloween binging has officially reached rock bottom and I am now so desperate to fuel my chocolate addiction that I will resort to eating a treat that could only have been considered delicious when it was invented in the 1950s. Do you know what other foods people considered delicious in the fifties? Aspics. Cheez Whiz. Pureed meat spreads. Gross.
Halloween night is a big one for our family. People tend to assume that, as the family of a dentist, we eschew sweets and only allow our children to bring home toothbrushes or sugar-free gum. But we are completely the opposite. This is how Halloween goes down at our house: it starts with a full-court press on the trick-or-treating. My older boys go out with pillowcases and return to the house halfway through to empty them out and go hit the neighborhoods a couple blocks over. The girls and little boys aren’t quite as aggressive, but seem to gather just as much in a shorter amount of time; they’re cuter, maybe?
Once the door-to-door begging is done, everyone reconvenes to spread out their loot on the living room floor, eating anything they want and trading with siblings and cousins, all while occasionally tossing me Junior Mints like I’m a trained seal. They also have strict instructions that if a Peanut Butter Snickers is discovered among their booty, I have first dibs, although I only invoke this privilege on the rarest of occasions (pregnancy, extreme grumpiness, etc.)
We let this craziness go on for about an hour, and then it’s down to business: everyone picks their 20 favorite candies and puts them in a bowl in the kitchen. Everything else gets dumped into our giant silver popcorn bowl and is set aside as an offering to The Great Pumpkin, who comes in the middle of the night and takes their candy to a happier place, leaving behind a small gift for each of them. This very thoughtful and amazingly well-prepared Great Pumpkin writes a kind note thanking the children for their candy, and then disappears into the night like a pre-diabetic and slightly selfish Santa Claus.
This worked fantastically when they were all little, but now that we have some teenagers in the mix, we are getting MAJOR push back on the Great Pumpkin idea. One dollar-store toy is no longer seen as a fair trade for two hours-worth of candy gathering, and they are understandably loathe to give up weeks’ worth of treats.
I, of course, am trying to make the Great Pumpkin thing last for as long as possible, because who, after all, is the Great Pumpkin? ME, of course! It’s ME, each night at 10 o’clock after they’ve all stopped coming downstairs from their beds to tell me they forgot to wash their gym shorts, and their brother won’t turn off the light and quit reading, and they really hate piano lessons and would I please just let them quit??? It’s ME, while they’re all in school and I’ve finally gotten the four-year-old to stay up in his room by himself for just one hour, and the house is quiet and my blogs are beckoning and no one is giving me side-eye for having ten peanut butter cups next to me as I read.
I consider my Great Pumpkin status as my divine right, seeing as I’m the one who wandered the aisles of Goodwill, looking for poodle skirts and zombie costumes and anything with a Spiderman logo on it. I’m the one who makes all this holiday wonder happen for my kids in the first place, not to mention the fact that I gave birth to each of them IN A VERY UNCOMFORTABLE FASHION, thank you very much.
If that’s not worth the right to pillage Twix bars and peanut butter cups by the handful whenever I want, then I’m afraid I don’t know what the true spirit of Halloween is anyway.