You're a mean one...

I'm like the Halloween Grinch this year. I can't wait for Halloween to be over. There are several reasons for this.

One, my kids have been talking about Halloween since July, which, don't get me wrong, I want them to have fun, but after several months of Halloween talk, I am pretty Halloween'ed out at this point.

Two, nightmares. Since my kids have been so over-the-top looking forward to Halloween, we started letting them have some Halloween stuff early. Around mid-September, we gave them some Halloween stories and I gave them a Scooby-Doo book for their story-reader. (A story reader is a toy that, well, reads books. It comes with special books and when you turn a page, it starts reading the page. It's pretty cool.)

Shortly thereafter, my son started getting nightmares on a nightly basis. For weeks my wife and I would be awakened several times a night because of scary shadows, creeps, scary pumpkins, mean witches and all kinds of other crazy things. When my son started saying, 'ZOINKS, I saw a shadow!' I knew what it was. Fucking Scooby-Doo. What the fuck was I thinking? Another idea blows up and backfires in my face. What else is new?

It didn't help that the nightmare material is abundant this time of year. The kids go into a store with my Wife and there's Halloween stuff everywhere. Normally it's not a problem to determine what is kid appropriate and what is 'scary', but not this time of year. There's skulls and demons and werewolves all over the place and there's no way to really know which creature is going to induce a nightmare and which one is just 'funny'. There's no rhyme or reason to it. What kind of pumpkin is a scary pumpkin and what kind of pumpkin is a nice pumpkin? I don't know. One witch is 'mean' and one witch is 'silly'. How am I supposed to tell what ghost is 'scary' and what ghost is 'nice'? It all looks like the same Halloween decoration crap to me.

It got to the point where we had to take all of the Halloween stories and other stuff away and tell them they could not have it back till it was almost Halloween. Thankfully the nightmares have subsided and we have been able to get back to getting a full night's sleep again.

Last but not least in my list of the reasons that I don't like Halloween this year: candy. Candy. Candy. Candy. Candy. All day long, 'can I have some candy?' My kids wake up in the morning. 'Dad, can we have some candy?'

'Sorry no candy before breakfast.'

'Ok. Maybe after breakfast?'

Oy.

Comments

[B]

We had 45 records and books to read a long with when I was a kid and not we did not have an 8-track player - hehe

[Me]

You forgot to mention that you had to trick or treat up hill. BOTH WAYS, in the snow, and you LIKED it ;)

[Cullen]

Heh. My kids are pretty crazy about it too. They know better than to ask for candy too often though. I've been known to give candy to neighbor's kids if they bug me about it too much. Yeah, yeah, I'm mean.

My oldest loves the scary stuff. My middle one is scared by freaking anything. My son is too young to know the difference. But my middle one (5) is finally getting better about Scooby Doo. She still doesn't like sleeping alone though. They have bunk beds, one of those with a full size on top and a single on the bottom. More often than not, they both sleep on the full-size. Even if they start out on different beds, often my younger daughter will move to the same bed with her sister some time in the middle of the night.

Kind of cute, actually. Until she comes and sneaks into bed with us.