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Halloween? Bah, Humbug--But Please Share the Chocolate

According to a survey of "Halloween Consumer Intentions and Actions" by the National Retail Federation, 29.6% of Americans are reducing their Halloween spending this year because of the economy. I am not among that 29.6%. The economy hasn't affected my Halloween spending at all. I'm shelling out the same amount I did last year, and the year before, and the year before that. Nothing.

It's not that I'm cheap. Well, actually, I am, but that's not the whole story. It's just that I don't really get Halloween. At least I don't get why it has become such a big deal.

This probably stems from the fact that when I was a kid we didn't pay much attention to Halloween. We never went trick-or-treating. When you live in the country and the closest neighbors are a mile down the road, going door to door isn't exactly practical.

We must have had some sort of Halloween parties at school, because I do have a vague memory of bobbing for apples. With only five kids in the whole school, though, there wasn't much point in dressing up in elaborate costumes. We've have all recognized each other anyway.

When I was in eighth grade, our school did go to another rural school for a Halloween party. I dressed up as a pirate, complete with eye patch, which skewed my vision enough so I kept bumping into things. One of my younger sisters had a long braid bobby-pinned to her own short hair, and the other kids were shocked when she took it off at the end of the party. It was real hair, too. Our grandmother had kept it from the one time years earlier she had cut her own hair short. (I suppose some people might think that keeping a braid of your own hair in your dresser drawer for years was a little spooky in itself.)

Whatever the reasons, I've always found Halloween more annoying than entertaining. Carving pumpkins and dressing up for costume parties can be fun. So is handing out candy to little kids in their parka-covered costumes, even the tiny trick-or-treaters who are a little vague about the whole process. But spooky movies and haunted houses are way too scary. Giving candy to pillowcase-toting kids as tall as I am who don't even bother to say "Thank you" is irritating. And decorating the yard with a bunch of plastic witches, skeletons, and pumpkin-head lights? Forget it.

Then there is always the stressful question of how much candy to buy and what kind. Do you get stuff you like and end up eating way too much of it yourself? Or do you get stuff you don't like and end up tossing the leftovers in the trash? Or should you get candy at all? My adult kids probably still roll their eyes when they remember my Halloween health-food phase of giving out peanuts or little boxes of raisins instead of candy—especially because my non-candy views never kept me from begging a couple of pieces of chocolate out of their bags. 

At any rate, it's a relief now to live on a dead-end street where the houses are scattered on large lots and nobody bothers to come trick-or-treating. I can leave the porch light off and skip the whole thing with a clear conscience. And I don't even have to think about whether my low opinion of Halloween is merely resentment because I never got any trick-or-treat candy when I was a kid.

Why Women of a Certain Age Are Such Good Drivers

According to reliable information that I just made up because I didn't find any statistics after five minutes of intensive Internet research, some of the safest drivers are middle-aged women whose kids are grown. Here are the top ten reasons this is true:

10. We're not distracted by eating in the car because we're always trying to lose five pounds.

9. After all those years of preparing family meals, we're not going to do anything that might increase our insurance premiums and reduce the money we have available for eating out.

8. We're not distracted by changing music CDs because all our favorite songs are still on cassette tapes.

7. It's hard to flirt your way out of a ticket when the patrolman is young enough to be your kid.

6. We're not distracted by looking for a radio station because we can easily find by touch the only two stations we listen to: oldies and NPR.

5. We don't touch up our makeup while we're driving because the magnifying mirror won't fit on the dashboard.

4. We never drink and drive because alcohol has too many calories.

3. We're less likely to use our cell phones while we drive. We don't answer the phone because it's buried in the bottom of our purse, so even if we hear it ring we won't be able to find it. We don't make calls because we've never figured out how to use speed dial and we can't see the keypad without our reading glasses.

2. After years of driving while simultaneously feeding Cheerios to toddlers in car seats, answering questions like "Where do babies come from?", and refereeing squabbles about who gets to sit by the window, being alone in the car makes driving a snap.

And the most important reason middle-aged women are the best drivers?

1. We know that, if we do get into an accident, the police report and the newspaper article are going to give our age.

Confusing, Amusing, or Just Plain Odd

Things that make a logical woman think twice:

Why, as a group of us were working out the other morning at the women-only fitness center, the background music was "Macho, Macho Man."

Why the covers of certain women's magazines always feature both a photo of a mouth-watering dessert (recipe on page 87) and a headline about the latest diet plan (details on page 34). It would seem to make more sense to alternate them, with one month's dessert leading logically to the next month's diet plan.

Why a newly purchased bottle of cosmetic stuff included a warning on the label: "Keep product away from of eyes." It was intended to be reassuring, no doubt, but it wasn't exactly practical. The stuff was eye makeup remover.

Why manufacturers and bra designers (now there's a 14-year-old boy's dream job for you) are so careful to make bras fit smoothly so they don't show under tee-shirts—and then they stick a decorative little ribbon or rosette right in the middle. There are probably entire factories in China dedicated to making these rosettes, which are shipped by the billions to bra-making factories, where hardworking women painstakingly sew them on. The bras are shipped to wholesalers, then distributed to stores, where they are bought by hardworking women who take them home, dig out their seam rippers or fingernail scissors, painstakingly cut off the little rosettes, and toss them into the trash.

Why children will sit at the dinner table and painstakingly separate every bit of fat out of their steak or their pork chop to avoid letting the most microscopic speck of the gross and disgusting stuff pass their delicate little lips—yet at the breakfast table, those same children will lie, cheat, steal, and elbow each other in order to get third and fourth pieces of bacon.

Just wondering. A logical woman would like to know.

Vegetarian Obesity

It was the green pepper I got at the grocery store this week that started me thinking great thoughts about giant vegetables. It was the size of an acorn squash, at least six inches long and four or five inches in diameter. When peppers are priced "each" rather than "per lb." you naturally go for the bigger ones, and at 99 cents this one was a real bargain.

Then there were the embarrassingly proportioned cucumbers we got from a friend's garden. They weren't yellow and overripe, they were just big. I've been told that, in Turkey, for one man to call another a "cucumber" is an insult he'd better be prepared to back up with his fists. I would think that being compared to these cucumbers would be a compliment.

The same person who reported the insulting capabilities of the cucumber also talked about Black Sea cabbages so huge that no one bought a whole one; you'd just tell the grocer how many kilos you wanted, and he'd whack off a section. And, of course, it isn't necessary to even mention how out of control zucchini can get if they're left in the garden a little too long.

But when it comes to oversized vegetables, the champion of champions has to be the giant pumpkin. A pumpkin festival was held downtown last weekend, along with a kids' costume parade, music, and food booths presumably specializing in pumpkin pie and muffins. The featured attraction was the giant pumpkin contest.

Six or seven contestants squatted along the street, looking like aging sumo wrestlers who had succumbed to gravity. Their bulging, sagging mounds of excess flesh were certainly big, if not exactly beautiful. Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater's wife would have had ample room to live in one, but decorating might have presented a challenge.

I suppose the fun of growing giant pumpkins lies in the challenge of producing one just a little bigger than last year's—or than the other guy's. Otherwise, it seems like a lot of trouble just to end up with something that is seriously ugly and doesn't even get made into pies.

Another featured event at the festival was the pumpkin catapult toss. Not surprisingly, the contestants were engineering students from South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. The purpose was to see which team could build a device capable of hurling a pumpkin the longest distance. It wasn't clear who was responsible for cleaning up the mess afterward.

They didn't use giant pumpkins, of course. Too bad; the idea offers some exciting possibilities. Just imagine the explosive impact of a thousand-pound pumpkin hitting the ground. Onlookers would need to wear raincoats to protect themselves from the spatter. Small children and pets would need to be kept at a safe distance, say a couple of blocks away. The Great Pumpkin Splat. I'm sure it would be a smashing success.

In Hot Water and Holding the Bag

Over a restaurant's breakfast menu the other morning, a friend raised an important question: Why do we use the word "poached" for both a deer taken out of season and an egg cooked in hot water?

Inquiring minds wanted to know. When I got home, I consulted the curious editor's best friend—the unabridged dictionary. I found two possible explanations.

According to our Random House Dictionary of the English Language (Unabridged), the word "poach" comes from Middle French "pocher" by way of Middle English "potch." It means "bag."

This word is the reason a bag is sometimes called a "poke," and it's where we get the expression "a pig in a poke." If you were foolish enough to buy a bagged pig without looking inside the sack to make sure you were actually getting pork on the hoof, you might be tricked into buying a less edible critter. You wouldn't know you'd been scammed until you "let the cat out of the bag."

But I digress. Back to poaching. The connection with hunting is clear enough. We still use "bag" to mean getting the game you're after. Besides, it makes sense that if you were hunting illegally, you might want to put whatever you got into a bag. But how do you get from bagging game to cooking eggs?

The RHDEL(U) says that an egg cooked in hot water is "poached" because the white holds the yoke the way a bag would. I'm not going to argue with a dictionary that weighs as much as a small child, but that seems like a stretch to me. Although I would concede that a quivering, runny poached egg looks like it ought to be in a bag, preferably a garbage bag.

There's another possibility, however. Another meaning of "poached," which the RHDEL(U) says comes from the Middle French "pocher" meaning "gouge," is "to mix with water and reduce to a uniform consistency, as clay." (There was no explanation of why Middle French apparently used the same word for "bag" and "gouge," as in, "Just stick that there pig in a poke, and if it squeals, poke it with a stick.")

There's also a word "poachy" that means "slushy or swampy." This seems to me to have a more reasonable association with the watery texture of a not-quite-boiled egg. Maybe poached eggs came into modern English through a swamp rather than in a bag.

Who knows? And, except for those of us who are nitpicking word freaks, probably no one really cares.

What I do know is that, if you steal an egg out from under your neighbor's hen and break it into boiling water, you're going to have a twice-poached egg. And if you shoot a deer or a pheasant out of season, you're likely to end up in hot water with egg on your face.