Skipping Halloween

I’m on the cusp of being done with the massive, life-dominating project I’ve been working on for three weeks, and if you can’t believe I didn’t even bother to pop over to the blog to make up some emergency, last-minute monthly GREAT goals—well, I can’t believe it either. But it was bad this time, I’m telling you. It was so bad, in fact, that WE SKIPPED HALLOWEEN.

In general I’m ambivalent about Halloween, but we’ve had some really fun ones. And I do like answering the doorbell and seeing the costumes. And I feel like it’s just part of the social contract: You give out candy because people gave out candy to you when you were 7, and that is THE WAY IT WORKS.

I figured one grumpy year wasn’t the end of the world, though, so we bought no candy and kept the porch light off. But then something awful happened: M.H. came home right around dusk with a TON of groceries and firm plans to cook some of them, which meant being in the kitchen, which meant being visible from the front door. When having the porch light off didn’t keep the kids from ringing our doorbell, I turned off the kitchen lights, closed the blinds, and taped pieces of paper over the small windows by the door. THAT didn’t stop them either. Of course, I had absolutely nothing in the house I could conceivably give a rogue trick-or-treater. So I frantically helped cook vegetables and put away a month’s worth of groceries, plagued by guilt and remorse, in the dark, while occasionally diving behind the kitchen island to hide from sugar-crazed children peeping through the cracks in the papers.

Mental note: A bowl of candy and a sign is the ABSOLUTE MINIMUM REQUIREMENT for Halloween.

On the plus side, having no candy in the house meant it was easy to stick to the AltShift diet, which is a good thing, because I’m very happy with how it’s going. At our last measure, I had lost four inches off my waist, and I’m not really interested in a fun-sized-Snickers-induced reversal of all that progress.