Halloween: A Holiday For Kids, Not Bartenders and Dentists

by Todd Kliman

I used to love Halloween.

It was the night of infinite possibilities, of dressing up and pretending to be anything you wanted -- anything at all -- and ditching the boring grown-ups and their dull, rule-driven world, if only for a few hours.

Which was pretty great in and of itself. But on top of that, there were rewards for this game of pretend. Candy rewards.

All that night, and for the rest of the week, too, we were obliged -- that's how the holiday worked; no one could pretend to tell us otherwise -- to feast on our loot, to gorge ourselves silly on miniature chocolate bars, Tootsie rolls, blowpops, lollipops, Candy apples, and all that other awesome sweet sticky stuff.

Halloween was sort of like Thanksgiving for pre-teens. Only much, much better.

That's not to say there weren't things to beware of in venturing out into the dark. There were bad people out there. Who did bad things. So of course it wasn't wise for small children to go unsupervised in strange areas, and we were advised, always, not to consume any piece of candy that wasn't wrapped.

But these were minor concerns. Halloween was fun. The funnest night of the year.

Now?

Now it's become a holiday so fraught with fear and hand-wringing, so wracked with earnest consideration of the issues of the day, that it's a wonder any parent bothers to send a kid out the door.

Naysayers and do-gooders wreck a perfectly good holiday, after the jump...

Earlier this week, a blogger for the San Francisco Chronicle online posted about what she called the "candy conundrum." Quoting a Bay Area pediatrician's tips for a "healthy holiday," she urged parents to encourage their trick-or-treaters to eat up the candy they gather that night and the next, rather than have them parcel it out gradually over the week (better for the teeth). What to do with the left-overs? Create "exchange programs" for the kids -- whereby the little ones trade the rest for non-sugary toys.

A story from the AP this week that centered on obesity also floated the idea of trading. It quoted a mother of two who plays "switch witch," exchanging toys for candy in the middle of the night. It noted that experts "suggest turning the night into a teaching moment about portion size and limits."

In Minneapolis, a local orthodontist made waves four years ago when she created a candy buy-back program; for every pound of candy that trick-or-treaters are willing to surrender, they are handed tokens that can be used to purchase gift cards and Webkins.

Is it asking too much to let the kids have one night of the year to eat themselves silly? To not be subjected, for one night, to fear-mongering about obesity and dental hygiene? To not see candy fetishized and thus turned into something bigger and more pernicious -- and of course more desirable -- than it is? To not have a "teachable moment"?

That's bad enough.

But as grown-ups have gone about dismantling a night of gorging good fun -- as they have robbed the holiday of its innocence and joy -- they have turned Halloween, those sly devils, into a night for themselves.

In big cities, many restaurants feature special Halloween menus, and the new generation of "mixologists" -- bartenders, basically, but with big ideas and very good p.r. -- can hardly wait to unleash its concoctions -- orange- and black-colored cocktails, cocktails with bugs suspended in ice like fossils preserved in amber -- on their partying, elaborately-got-up patrons.

Adults-only theme parties are bigger than ever, and Obama and McCain masks are flying off the shelves. The adult-oriented Groovycandies.com does a brisk business selling golden oldies candies, as does a website called Hometownfavorites.com.

For many grown-ups, Halloween has become the ultimate retro holiday, a day to indulge their inner child, eat the candies they were weaned on in the '60s and '70s, and be carried away on a cloud of nostalgia.

Talk about trick or treat.

Todd Kliman is a James Beard Award-winning restaurant critic and the food and wine editor of Washingtonian magazine. The Wild Vine, his book about the Rosetta stone of American wine, is due in 2009.