Let the teens have their Halloweens

It’s that time of year when parents take to social media to ask a variation of the same question: is my teenage child too old to go trick-or-treating?

No. The answer is no. They are not too old. They can come to my house.

I, for one, welcome the teenage trick-or-treaters. Even, and this might be controversial, the ones who have half-assed costumes.

This is the rough social contract of Halloween. Kids show up to participating houses in a costume — I’m guessing I’m going to have to brush up on my KPop Demon Hunters to understand what I’m looking at this year — yell “Trick or treat” and get candy. That’s it. That’s the holiday.

Why can’t teens, who are just a taller type of child, do that? Also if we don’t allow teens, who are the tricks for? The soft, pumpkin-pail-wielding toddlers who roll up to your house when it’s still light out? Please.

Some people have very strong opinions about this.

Bathurst, N.B., made headlines a few years ago when it passed a city bylaw making it illegal (illegal!) for people over the age of 16 to trick-or-treat and imposed a curfew of 8 p.m. This is actually a relaxed version; previously it was 14 and 7 p.m., respectively. Violators are subject to fines.

How is something like this even enforced? We’re out there ID-ing trick or treaters now?

Then there are those who complain about teenagers’ costumes or lack thereof. I read an article that quoted some guy complaining about kids wearing their sports jerseys as costumes.

Look: “Hockey player” is a valid costume, even if you are one. So is “ballerina.” I don’t care if you’re rocking the same thing tomorrow at dance class, at least an attempt was made.

However old you are in Grade 8 is when I stopped trick or treating. I didn’t really have a costume per se that year, either. I wore a Halloween-print skirt and did my hair in space buns wrapped with metallic pumpkins (it was 1998). I drew eyeliner spider webs on my face. Cute Witch, I guess? Halloween as Concept? Festive Dental Clinic Receptionist?

At any rate, I went out with a small group of girls from school and we had a great time — right up until we were mugged for our candy by some boys from our school. Boys we saw every day. Boys we had known since kindergarten. Boys who didn’t think this caper all the way through because they were also boys who had parents whose addresses we knew.

I don’t recount this story very much because it is a huge bummer and I like to keep this particular memory locked, but I can still conjure the red-hot humiliation I felt when some guy from my homeroom hissed, “What are you supposed to be, bitch?” as he ineffectually tried to whack me with 100 Mars bars in a pillowcase.

Anyway, that was the last time I went trick -or-treating. What a fun-sized Halloween anecdote! Tell me again how normalized misogyny in late-’90s culture had zero effect on anyone!

I do not share this to say all teenagers out trick or treating turn into roving mini-gangs stealing each other’s candy and then hitting each other with it. I share it because I wish my last Halloween wasn’t ruined. I wish I wasn’t embarrassed or, you know, robbed — literally and metaphorically — by boys who made my joy feel silly and small and like I shouldn’t have been out at all.

Boys who, now that I think of it, maybe had their joy made to feel silly and small and like they were too old to go trick or treating, so they menaced other kids.

I also share it because I remember that being a teenager is hard. We adults don’t need to make it harder by making them feel weird or bad about hanging on to the most fun parts about being a kid.

Especially kids these days. It’s always been hard to be a teenager, caught between childhood and adulthood and being not quite either. But it’s harder now, in many ways. For many of them, so much of their lives are lived on a phone. Why wouldn’t we want them to get outside, get creative with a costume and spend time with each other?

I say I wish my last Halloween wasn’t ruined, but the truth is, you don’t always know when it’s the last. I don’t know the last day I played with Barbies. Or the date of my last slumber party.

I probably thought, after that bad Halloween, that I would have another chance next year. But then I was in high school and I felt “too old” and there was no next year and there would never be a next year again.

Childhood is vanishingly short, is what I’m saying. Let the teens have a few more Halloweens.

jen.zoratti@freepress.mb.ca

Jen Zoratti
Columnist

Jen Zoratti is a columnist and feature writer working in the Arts & Life department, as well as the author of the weekly newsletter NEXT. A National Newspaper Award finalist for arts and entertainment writing, Jen is a graduate of the Creative Communications program at RRC Polytech and was a music writer before joining the Free Press in 2013. Read more about Jen.

Every piece of reporting Jen produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print – part of the Free Press‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.