If You’re a Halloween Party Pooper, Come Sit Down Next to Me

You can’t walk into any professional service office in Sacramento and not find it decorated in some sort of PC-tasteful Halloweeny stuff. The sort of stuff you imagine a committee spent hours pondering. Like, OK, hanging stuffed scarecrows on the cabinet knobs suggest a fall theme, and not necessarily a human sacrifice theme, so let’s use those. Pumpkins, OK. Knives and daggers and blood, not OK. It’s all so lame and blasé. But the hospital staff at U.C. Davis hope to brighten your day and keep employees engaged, morale high and the spirit of Halloween can be found in a candy dish, wrapped singular, of course.

My neighbor down the street hangs out a Halloween flag, or maybe it’s an autumnal flag with leaves on it, signaling to all passersby what time of year it is because otherwise we would be uninformed. I should mention that lots of noteworthy events have happened on Halloween. For example, the great Harry Houdini died on Halloween. The Donner party initiated camp on Halloween. They set off the first thermonuclear bomb in the Marshall Islands the year I was born on Halloween. I had my first wedding on Halloween. And it’s a holiday today that children almost everywhere in the world celebrate, alongside their parental figures. Nobody would ever dream of canceling Halloween except probably for me. Because after 60 years of it, that’s enough.

I’m just one big party pooper. Don’t wanna dress up, not even if it means I could masquerade as Donald Trump. Hey, I’ve got the blonde hair. Don’t wanna hand out candy, either. My husband and I tend to buy really horrid candy, stuff nobody really likes, so when we have leftover candy, we’re not tempted to eat it. I cannot tell you how many boxes of exploding Willy Wonka Nerds I am capable of pouring down my throat, and that’s just about the worst candy ever.

The last time I can recall wearing a costume on Halloween was when I lived in the foothills of Tustin in southern California, circa 1980, with my second husband, now dead. We owned and managed an investment club, of sorts, made up of mostly real estate agents who hoped to hit the big time by buying investment property in Orange County, and we invited all 500 of those guys to our home for a Halloween party. We had bought a huge home with several wings and an indoor pool, much of which we never utilized. During the party, our septic tank backed up and flooded our sidewalk. We blamed it on Halloween.

Three years ago we went to the Kitchen Restaurant for Halloween, but have since discovered other opportunities to avoid the celebration. For example, lots of homeowners in Sacramento, I hear, just turn off their lights and sit in the dark on Halloween. Fortunately, our street in Land Park doesn’t seem to attract a lot of kids anymore, and it’s out of the way for most Trick-or-Treaters to visit. I think my husband is picking up a pumpkin at Sacramento Natural Foods, though and, thanks to Martha Stewart, the trendy thing now is to drill quarter-size holes in your pumpkin and stick in a candle. No more smiley or frowny faces, just a bunch of holes in a vegetable. That, we can probably manage.