Posted on October 10, 2008 - by deCadmus

The Reason for the Season

Caught a snatch of this on our local public radio station… and was delighted to find that Phil has posted the whole schmear at VDB:

…once we’ve scammed everything conceivable from everybody conceivable, we return home, the girls dump their bags of individually-wrapped emulsified chocolate out on the floor, and then, after fighting over any full-sized candy bars, they eat enough to feel queasy and go to bed early.

Which gives my wife and me a chance to graze their half-melted candy piles, fight over any Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, eat enough to feel queasy and go to bed early ourselves.

It’s a beautiful thing.

But the last few years, something about it has begun to bother me. It’s come to feel like something crucial is missing. Maybe it’s the fact that the candy and the plastic pumpkins appear so early in the stores.

Whatever the reason, it’s begun to seem to me that in our rush to buy and sell and hype Halloween, we’ve forgotten what I call the reason for the season.

And the true reason for the Halloween season is not to fatten our kids with Gummy Worms or to dress them up like My Little Pony – it’s to scare the living bejeebers out of them.

[Image: Troy B. Thompson]