Nightmare on Trick or Treat street

There is an estate in the town closest to me with wide looped streets and large pleasant houses. It’s a Mecca for the trick or treat crowd who descend upon it come Halloween like swarms of living dead locusts.

 

On the 31st of October each year, a significant percentage of the estate’s residents flee for the night. Others darken every light and I assume, hide under the covers or tip toe about with night vision glasses until the ordeal is over. The remaining brave souls light carved pumpkins, display giant spiders in their front gardens and welcome the masses of ghosts, ghouls, dinosaurs, princesses and Smurfs that teem in from the hills and valleys.

 

Like previous years, my cousin and I will herd our country bumpkin children into our vehicles, drive to this well-appointed estate and follow at an appropriate distance, mildly embarrassed by this custom of sending our blood-splattered, tiara-donning offspring to the doors of strangers’ houses so that they can demand a vast quantity of sugar products that we as parents don’t even want them to have. I will be cold, and missing Coronation Street and wondering how this happened; how I went from watching American kids in American movies trick or treating to watching Irish kids trick or treating in Ireland.

 

The radical change in Halloween makes me feel kind of ancient. What I remember as a low key non- event marked by barm brack, ghost stories and the annual school art project of transforming an egg carton and pipe cleaners into a representation of a spider has become a full scale Event.

 

Now entire supermarket aisles teeter with mountains of king-sized bags of chocolate and buckets of boiled sweets, pumpkins sell out and people actually buy Halloween decorations.  

 

Too late, I fear, to shove the sugar pushing back under a rock, but I’m not going to complain; I’ll leave that to the people on the estate plagued for a night with mini pirates, Minions and (I’m sorry) my children.