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Halloween in Hitchin and this place goes full out!
Ernie was dressed as Satan (odd choice for a Christian, but he's always liked the bad guys ever since he preferred Mr Tod to Peter Rabbit - and Satan v Jesus is a very similar dynamic, though I hope James Cordon never plays our Lord and saviour) and Phoebe had made her own costume and was a Minecraft Chicken, which showed some imagination and artistic flair and is surely the scariest thing known to mankind. Has Satan ever prowled the streets of this world with a Minecraft chicken for company? Who knows?
We went up the hill to a house which had had some skellingtons sitting on the balcony for a week or two now. The owners had set up a paddling pool where you could fish for ducks and win a prize. The kids were very impressed with this, but there was more to come. Only a few people on this street had the requisite decorations to invite in callers (as always it's great to have a day where we blow the whole don't-take-sweets-off-strangers thing out of the water), so we took an unplanned detour down a neighbouring road which was a bit busier. And one householder had set up the most elaborate Halloween decorations that I've ever seen. There was a projection on the side of their house promising the show would start in two minutes and they'd rigged up speakers and there was a voice over about The Nightmare Before Christmas and projected snow flakes and skulls falling down the house and then a big present on the doorstep opened to shoot out dry ice smoke and lights before some spiders on strings fell from the trees down on to the watching children. They had bars of Zombie chocolate to give to everyone. I have never seen anything like it.
We thought we'd gone to town with a few gravestones and a skellington on the door and some ghosts in the bush, but we will have to up our game next year if we are going to be the kings of Halloween.
It's remarkable how trick or treating has become such a big thing in the UK over the last forty years. I remember doing it once or twice in my mid (or maybe late) teens, but before that I don't know if we did anything at all for Halloween. A quick google suggests that whilst the tradition dates back to the 16th Century, it didn't really take off in the UK until after the release of ET. Was it really that organic? Or did Big Gummy Sweets have something to do with it?
In everything else parents have become more paranoid about their kids doing anything that might put them in paedo danger or at the mercy of people giving them drugs or poison, but on this one dark night it's Paedo Purge time and anything goes. It does though, I suppose, prove the absolute power that sweets have over children, so it's definitely good that we drum into them not to take candy from strangers for the rest of the year. The streets were thronging with kids off their nut on the excitement and danger and sugar. And if we lose a few kids to drug-laced gummies, razor blades in the Haribo and serial killers then that's a small price to pay. We basically saw someone's house turn into a movie.
My favourite thing was that Ernie committed to his role as the Dark Lord and would say "Trick or Treat" in a terrifying rasp, before then sweetly saying "Thank you" when picking out his sweets.
We missed our village and going round in a gang (though come on guys, get your fucking projectors out at least) and Halloween really brings home how fast time is going, I guess because it's one of the few days where things are different, so you vividly remember the last one. And how many to go before they get too big to do this any more. Judging by my own history and the age of some of the trick or treaters who came to our house later, I'd say about 15 more years.
