Road Apples
Oct. 27, 2008

Something else to avoid this Halloween

By Tim Sanders

Halloween is almost here, and that holiday brings to mind one of the dopiest comments I’ve ever heard. I’ve certainly heard more than my share of dopey comments, and have made a few of them myself, but this comment is so dopey that I realize I can’t compete. It has a jarring, multi-faceted stupidity to it which should make the average listener say, "Geez, that’s not just dumb, it’s profoundly dumb on several different levels." Unfortunately, the average listener isn’t what he used to be. Like everything else in our society, the average listener has been dumbed way down, too.

But at any rate, here’s the comment, variations of which I’m sure you’ve heard every year around this time:


"Andrea and me is taking the kids out to roll yards this Halloween.”


The statement, or one like it, is usually delivered with an air of self-satisfaction which would seem to indicate that the parents involved are about to donate a lung and a kidney, or at the very least are planning to home school their kids in advanced trigonometry.

Okay, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: "What’s wrong with taking your kids yard rolling. It’s traditional. My parents took me yard rolling, too." Well, that may be true, and indeed if we traced our lineage back several generations, we might all find our common ancestors decorating the neighbors’ trees in the primeval rain forest with pages from old Sears & Roebuck catalogs. But that doesn’t mean that taking the kids yard rolling is a laudable enterprise.

Here’s why:


1. Parents and kids were not designed to be buddies. When I was a kid, back when things were rational and the earth spun on its axis without the grease of mawkish sensitivity gumming things up, we all understood that parents and kids were very different organisms. The things that kids wanted to do, like using aerosol cans as flamethrowers, were not the things their parents wanted them to do. And the things that kids didn’t want to do, like playing the accordion or raking leaves, were exactly the things their parents yearned for them to do. When we succumbed to our parents’ wishes, it was only because nature had designed them to be bigger than we were, and given them bank accounts. It was a kid’s duty, back then, to learn what his parents would object to, and then spend most of his waking hours figuring out how to do those things. It was parents vs. kids, and the system built character.

2. Things our parents didn’t want us to do included smoking, consuming alcoholic beverages, and having sex before the age of twenty. That made those things very attractive to young people. Had our parents encouraged us to do all of those things, we would have had much less interest in them. And had they gone that extra step and decided, through some unfortunate series of electrical brain short circuits, to accompany us in our search for a discarded pack of Winstons, a bottle of Budweiser, and a young lady gullible enough to fall for our really bad impression of James Dean, we’d have been mortified. We wanted to discover the sweet mystery of life without parental interference.

3. Halloween pranks fell into the general category of things our parents didn’t want us to do. It was the fact that our parents didn’t want us to do them which made them so enjoyable. Now granted, during my youth, when creatures like the Stegosaurus, the Brontosaurus, Captain Kangaroo and Mr. Green Jeans roamed the earth, nobody rolled yards. Back then toilet paper was too valuable a commodity to be wasted on yard decoration. What we did, however, was decorate windows with soap. All of our primitive dwellings had a bar of soap somewhere, and we could find it, conceal it in our pocket, and escape the house without arousing suspicion. Not that our arsenal was necessarily limited to that ubiquitous bar of Ivory (which worked much better on windows than, say, Lava or Dove). Another favorite Halloween gambit was the infamous sack of manure carefully placed on someone’s doorstep, doused with lighter fluid, and then set afire. The object was to ring the doorbell repeatedly and then hide in the bushes until the unsuspecting homeowner, realizing that the gift on his doorstep had somehow spontaneously combusted, proceeded to stomp on it very forcefully to put it out. There were other Halloween pranks which required windshields, Vaseline and talcum powder, and still others which involved jack-o-lanterns filled with Limburger cheese, but those were reserved for bad people who disliked children and made a habit of calling their parents and informing on them every time they saw us–by which I mean children in general–innocently amusing themselves out in the field behind their house, smoking rum-soaked cigars and perusing girly magazines.

4. But I digress. The point is that when we pulled our Halloween pranks, our parents did not participate. What if my dad, who wasn’t that much different from other dads in the neighborhood, had approached me and said, "Say, Tim old buddy, how about if you and Chuck and Sammy and Bruce and your mom and I all pile into the Studebaker and drive around town this Halloween and soap windows and set sacks of manure on fire? Your mother and I want to be part of your life too, you know. We could make memories together! It would be a sharing experience. Wouldn’t that be fun, HUH?"

Well, had that happened, I’d have run screaming from the house and later that evening, when Dad was out in the garage re-jetting his carburetor, I’d have told Mom about it so she could take him to the doctor to see if there were any pills for his problem, or if he needed hospitalization.

So the next time you hear some idiot bragging about taking his kids out to roll yards, remind him of the good old days when buddies were buddies and parents were parents, and never the twain did meet. And if he’s still bound and determined to drain the very last drop of joy from his children’s Halloween pranks, at least encourage him to stay home when the kids start dating. The last thing little DeWayne and Tiffany need on prom night is Mom and Dad offering technical advice from the front seat. It could traumatize the poor kids for life.