I considered doing something anti-community this week.  Rather, I considered not doing something.  I was seriously thinking about keeping the lights off and not buying any candy and stopping by a bar for a while on the way home tomorrow night.  I was going to skip the whole trick-or-treating thing.

I have my reasons.  Our house is up a steep hill and I have actually stood at the door on previous Halloween evenings while filling little buckets with candy and heard other children down at the bottom of the driveway say It’s not worth it when they see the climb.  We also don’t want the temptation of the candy in the house, even for one night.  I don’t believe in giving crappy candy so we get the good stuff – Reese’s, Snickers, York Peppermints, Twix – things I will eat when they are just sitting there and I have to keep expending all that energy to get up and walk to the door with the huge bowl of them.  Also, I work on Thursday nights and won’t get home until it’s almost over, so why bother?

Aren’t they good reasons?

We don’t have small children and we don’t know many of those in our neighborhood.  It would be so easy to just opt out.  It’s not up to us.  We’ve done our time on that circuit.  Even though I’ll spend time Facebook-liking the many pictures of my friends’ kids in their costumes in faraway cities, who wants to keep interrupting the World Series or Parks and Recreation for all these unknown neighborhood kids?  Some of the older ones seem to think they’re doing me a favor as they jut out their pillowcase-bags while checking their phones and avoiding eye contact. 

That’s the temptation.  It’s not the candy’s siren call.  It’s the allure of proclaiming ourselves done, moved on, past all that.  It’s the easy answer thinking:  But I don’t even know them or It’s not like when we were kids.  The thing is, it probably isn’t like it was when we were kids.  I really did know many more of my neighbors then than I do now – I even knew the ones who were old and retired or who didn’t have kids.  It was a different time.  But I suspect this wasn’t different:  Those families I knew then didn’t want to keep getting up to answer the door either.  They had also worked long days.  They were tired and didn’t really care if I was dressed as a Gypsy – again.  But they stocked up on candy and turned the lights on and answered the door and were appropriately impressed with my scarves.

Community requires participation.  Not knowing the neighbors is not an excuse to keep not knowing them, especially while lamenting the way it used to be.  It’s a call to try harder – or just plain try.  I may be far from my Goddaughter and the other cute children whose pictures I’ll peruse, but these are the kids right in front of me and they want some candy and attention.  Maybe that’s all it will be but they deserve at least this modicum of engagement by the adults in their neighborhood.   

The lights will be on at our house Thursday.  The good candy will be in the bowl by the door and I may even holler down the hill to encourage the kids to make the trek up.  It is, quite honestly, the least I can do.  It’s better than nothing and it’s better than being the dark house with the old people who don’t like kids.  Boo to that.

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photo credit:  “Friendly Pumpkin,” © 2009 Anders Lagerås, CC BY-SA 3.0