Remember the good old days of walking three miles in the blistering cold to get just one more lousy Reese's Peanut Butter Cup? The hours spent preparing every aspect of your costume and then the fight that ensued when your mom made you wear your winter coat over it anyhow? How about trying to trick your younger siblings into trading you their Three Musketeers for that crappy marshmallow peanut in the plastic bag? What fond memories those childhood Halloweens brought us. Weeks of planning and preparation followed by days of sugar highs and stomachaches. It just didn't get better than that.
It never quite made sense to me as a child how I could get candy for free simply for wearing a Superman or kitty cat costume. But I knew not to question the brilliance of the holiday and learned to look forward to the tradition of getting pounds of treats dropped into my cheep plastic jack o' lantern (The ones we always made our moms buy us even though they broke within 5 minutes of trick or treating and we ended up having to use plastic super market bags anyway). Halloween was the essence of what it was to be a kid, with one night of wild freedom to be someone you always wished you were.
At a certain point, it is truly necessary to accept that you are too old to go door to door in exchange for cheap candy that you could simply get yourself at the store. Perhaps this point is when you realize you are taller than the person who answers the door and asks you condescendingly, "And what are you supposed to be?" Then you have the urge to just grab the basket of Snickersout of their hands and start pelting them so that they'll just cut the chitchat and move it along. After all, at a certain point, Halloween becomes more of a candy collection challenge than a fun filled activity. Sometimes, with the overly competitive teens, it can even get violent.
While it's true that sometimes the line becomes blurred between acceptable trick or treating age and moronic teenager with a half-assed costume, there are some sure fire ways to know it is time to hang up your plastic mask and turn in your dollar store cape.
Thus, from the home offices in Baltimore, Maryland?
The top 10 ways you know you're too old to be trick or treating:
10. Instead of just complaining, you can just kick the ass of anyone who gives you fruit.
9. You dress up like a ghost and at every house you go to they tell you not to burn a cross on their lawn.
8. The cotton candy you're eating keeps getting caught in your goatee.
7. When you offer up your UNICEF box, they tell you to get a job.
6. The nice man at one of the houses you go up to tells you that your kids are cute, indicating the bunch of 5 year olds standing in front of you.
5. You tell the owner of the Halloween costume store that you are buying the Tinkerbell outfit for your cousin just so he'll stop giving you suggestive glances.
4. You look for the apple with the razor blade in it because the one you're using is getting dull.
3. When the old woman is fumbling around her living room looking for the candy corn, you say, "hurry up Toots, I'm double parked out here!"
2. After you get your candy you ask for a light.
1. You pregame in your dorm room before heading off to trick or treat.
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