Sunday, Nov. 01, 2009

Too old for tricks and treats

Apparently I’m getting too old for Halloween.

Not too old to trick or treat, I mean. There appears to be no age limit on that, even though people try to impose one.

Uptown Columbus for its Saturday “Spooktacular” specified that children under 3 got in free, and those age 4-12 would be charged $1 — implying those 13 and older should grow up.

Fort Benning implied much the same by issuing guidelines for those younger than 13 to trick or treat on post.

I have friends who no longer stock candy on Halloween because they’re tired of giving treats to boys 16 or older who are carrying sacks but wearing no costumes.

I went online to see what folks thought the maximum age should be, and found Web sites where readers posted “Never!” in reply to “When are you too old to trick or treat?”

I posted a story about this on ledger-enquirer.com, but it got only a few responses, like:

“Yeah, they come around every year — 15-year-olds with some of mom’s makeup carelessly spackled on their face, the same T-shirt they’ve had on for days and a pillow case to hold candy. Losers! I guess they need to keep their energy up while they sit around playing X-Box all afternoon.”

“One year I had a PREGNANT teenager come to my house to trick or treat. She was really pregnant. It wasn’t her costume!”

I bet that fetus wasn’t wearing a mask, either.

So anyway, with no clear consensus on how old’s too old to trick or treat, I guess I could, too — if I could get my costume finished.

It was a simple idea: I would take the old metal frame from a lamp shade, tape flashlights to it, recreate the shade with parchment paper, screw the frame to a white hardhat — after drilling a hole through it — and go to a party as a floor lamp.

But first I had to go buy more flashlights because just one or two didn’t produce enough light, and then fitting the flashlights around the hardhat got complicated. And finally, drilling through the curved top of a plastic hardhat just seemed way too dangerous. For me.

I likely would drill through my hand and wind up back at the emergency room. I was just there on Labor Day, when I almost cut a finger off trying to eat pasta.

I imagined showing up there on Halloween and the nurses saying, “Are you going to be here every holiday? We’re hoping for a slow Thanksgiving.”

So, instead of screwing the shade to the hat, I had to go back to the store to buy more white tape with which to affix it, because I obviously was going to run out while taping the parchment paper to the frame. I told my wife all this, and she said: “If only you put this much effort into … (she thought for a moment) … anything.”

She’s right: Halloween is way too complicated, for a man my age, and I need to grow up and quit wasting so much time on it.

So next year I’m going to stuff a basketball under my shirt and go to the party as a pregnant teenager.

Tim Chitwood, 706-571-8508.