Halloween is over which means it is my dad's birthday. Coming from a family with 13 people in it (11 kids), it was always difficult to remember each other's birthdays, but we could always remember my dad's because it was the day after Halloween.
We would spend all Halloween night running from house to house filling our pillow cases with candy. The key was to pick busy streets for halloweeners because that means that the people were already at the door passing out candy. You could run up, grab the candy and immediately take off for the next house. Slow streets meant that you would have to wait for the person to get off of their rear and walk to the door. Nothing was worse than having to wait 34 seconds to get your treat and be heading off to the next house. If you could do it under less than 14 seconds, chances were, you could fill that pillow case up and possibly move on to pillow case number two. It was nice having a couple brothers close to my age who shared my anxious energy to get as much candy as possible; and thanks to the residents on Mayberry and Carnegie Avenues who didn't notice our tendency to double dip.
After completing our Halloween haul we would always try to sneek inside the house and dump two-thirds of our candy in our room so our mom wouldn't notice how much we really had. We would then show our mom one-third of what we actually got and then she would take it away and offer us one piece of candy a day. How totally ridiculous was that. One fun size snickers or a roll of smarties a day. We were certainly deprived children...of course we did consume the other two-thirds of the hidden candy (500-600 pieces) within 22.5 hours after Halloween.
But before we would put our Halloween candy away we would all honor our dad's birthday and give him a present. We would each alllow him to choose ONE piece of candy. At the end of Halloween night, there would literally be thousands of pieces of candy in our house, and dad would only end up with eleven. Now that, is truly pathetic...or maybe it is cute and endearing.
Happy Birthday Dad, your Laffy Taffy is in the mail!!!
