It is 22 October. There are 9 days until Halloween.

As I’ve said before (just last week, matter of fact), for a kid, Halloween is all about the candy. Sure, getting to dress up as your favorite monster or movie character is pretty cool, but it’s only a means to an end. As Garfield says in Garfield's Halloween Adventure:

"Halloween's my kind of a holiday. It's not like those other, stupid holidays. I don't get pine needles in my paws. There's no dumb bunnies, no fireworks, no relatives. Just candy. Boom! You go out, you get candy. It's as simple as that."

Or to put it more succinctly: Candy, candy, candy, candy, candy!

If Halloween is the time for candy (…candy, candy, candy…sorry! Gotta get ahold of myself), then childhood is the time for pushing boundaries (and buttons, as well), of testing your mettle to see what you are capable of. Certainly, watching horror movies was a way of pushing myself into unfamiliar and uncanny territory. Sure, I saw Halloween II and survived, but could I stand to watch The Beast Within?

And if I could take The Beast Within, could I stomach The Thing?

In addition to being able to watch the goriest movies on HBO, one of the other badges of honor you earned as a kid in my neighborhood was hitting every house during trick-or-treating.

I grew up in a housing plan in Western Pennsylvania. All of the homes looked vaguely similar. There was probably a half-dozen or so different layouts, and each house was a variation on one of those themes. Even though it was a small plan – everything sat in less than a quarter of a square mile of hilly land – on Halloween night, it became a 200-house death march that tested the intestinal fortitude of the heartiest trick-or-treater.

But not every trick-or-treater was able to run the gauntlet. First, you had to be old enough to go out on your own. Second, you had to have stamina. There was no way my dad was gonna agree to go trudging up and down the streets with me. We usually went up one side of our street until it ended at a T-intersection, then turned around hitting the opposite side until we got back home. After those 30 or so houses, I was pooped.

As I got older, though, I could talk my dad into following me as I hit the Pinehurst loop. That added another 30 houses to the total, but it still wasn’t the entire plan. As I circled back to our street, I looked up as Pinehurst continued on, and I could see all those houses and imagine all that candy…

…candy, candy, candy, candy…

Sorry…

Finally, I was old enough to go out with my friends without parental supervision one year. It was time for us to tempt fate and attempt the impossible.

Like The Thing, I wish this story had a happy ending.

Things started off well. We made it up our street and around the Pinehurst loop. Soon, we were crossing over to new territory, to those houses we’d never been to before. But then I noticed that we had begun to slow down. We weren’t hitting the houses at quite the same machine-gun, rapid-fire rate. Then, one or two of us (I shan’t name names!) bolted to head back home or to hang out at a friend’s house. Those who remained soldiered on as best we could.

But then, the final indignity happened. We discovered that people ran out of candy and closed up shop quite early! We found fewer and fewer houses with their front porch lights on – the universal signal that trick-or-treaters were welcome. After passing the dozenth or so dark house, we gave up and headed home. We all knew people – older siblings of friends, for instance – who had bragged of trick-or-treating at every house. Those people couldn’t be…liars, could they?

I went home, cold, disappointed, and slightly wiser of the ways of the world. I still had taken in a pretty good haul, and there isn’t much in life that is so upsetting that a few Kit Kats and Charleston Chews can’t smooth over. But I never tried to run the gauntlet again, and when I heard of other kids, before and after my time, bragging of the feat, I just looked at them and nodded conspiratorially. You can’t kid a kidder, after all.