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Bookmarks and other treats
To paraphrase a good friend, “It’s a sad day when the garden furniture gets put away for the winter.” Maybe she feels the way I do about the changing of seasons, this year. It feels as if we didn’t really have enough summer and here we are, knee-deep in fall. This summer afforded us an opportunity to visit with family and friends, outside, people we hadn’t seen since the big lockdown. So, away go the Muskoka chairs and out come the rakes and garden waste bags. And, darn it all, we’re still social distancing. We’re still wearing masks everywhere we go. We’re still wondering when the heck this fuzzy, sickening dream is going to be over. We really, really wanted to believe DJTurnip when he raged on about the “China Virus” and how it would magically disappear when the weather got hot. These days, the only thing I wish would “disappear” is the USA’s election and their prognosticating Clown-in-Chief. There. I said it. I’ll take wearing a mask over listening to DJTurnip blustering, bullying and blundering away every, single day. Whew! As I write this, there are only nine days to go.
DJTurnip aside, my next biggest problem right now is, “What will LOML and I do about a celebration like Hallowe’en?” One moment we’re yakking about sitting on the front porch, with a glass of vino, shouting and joking with our neighbour across the road, while handing out treats to the little devils. The next moment, I see us sitting inside the house, in the dark, wishing the whole Hallowe’en event would just go away, secretly hoping our house doesn’t get egged. Funny thing is, I’m sorta “okay” with the house being TP’d. We’ve learned our lesson about this pandemic, as regards toilet paper. On the roll or unrolled, getting TP’d might be a bit like winning a lottery. I’m not afraid to re-roll when the “going gets tough”. And, just to be clear, I’m not being a cheapskate about handing out treats. To be honest, we’ve bought, and consumed, a Hallowe’en’s worth of little chocolate bars so far. A bit of quality control, you might say. The thing is LOML and I rather enjoy handing out treats and always make sure we’re handing out the kind of treats we wish we’d been given when we were little Trick ‘r’ Treaters, back in the olden days. I can’t tell you how many apples, shelled peanuts and nasty Hallowe’en kisses we would have received on our ghoulish rounds. Occasionally, someone in the neighbourhood would handout homemade fudge or candy apples, but you had to know who and where and be there before the sun set.
Well, I’m not whipping up a batch of fudge and I’m definitely not making candy apples. I might go to the local grocery and buy a couple, or three, boxes of little chocolate bars. You know what I mean! To replenish the stores of Trick ‘r’ Treats we’ve already consumed. We’ve actually convinced ourselves the bowl of little chocolate bars on the dining room table is for the grandchildren when they visit. Neither of us have admitted we know better, even though the evidence is casually tucked away in vases, hallway drawers, recycling bins and being used as bookmarks. Yep, I wrote “bookmarks”. The KitKat books are mine. The Coffee Crisp are his. And, now we have an extra family member living with us until the end of November, he’s been assigned the little Smarties boxes as his place markers. It’s almost cute. Almost, not quite. Actually, it’s a bit sad.
With Hallowe’en rapidly approaching, the discussion about how to handle the event has popped up at every meal since the retailers began stocking the shelves with sweeties. We’ve watched all of the ingenious videos where savvy folks use PVC pipes or flexible vent hoses to “chute” the treats to kids. We’ve talked about putting a table at the end of the driveway with a bin of treats on it, a sort of haunt-by event. We’re a bit concerned about this approach, thinking one or two kiddies might over-treat themselves, leaving none for other ghosts and goblins. Our next great idea was to toss candies, from the safety of the porch, to the kids. Believe it or not, I didn’t like that idea at all. It just seemed too rude and the potential to pelt an annoying brat with something other than mini chocolate bars was too great.
As Sunday turns to Monday, it’s looking a whole lot like one of us will head to the shop and buy more teeny-weeny candy bars. Just how many of those bars will actually be “shelled out” to COVID-19-weary goblins on Saturday may depend upon how many bars survive The Zombie Apo-KitKat-lypse at our house.
Yep, that’s what we’re calling it.
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