Halloween, that pagan festival linked to marking the end of harvest season and beginning of winter, is the worst annual event on my family's calendar. It's a recently adopted one. And it's the one I won't be celebrating again. Why should I? What have I harvested as we go into summer, not winter?
Luckily last Wednesday evening two of my children joined friends as I acquired two friends of my youngest. We would meet their parents at a local park to join a large communal Halloween party. Lovely idea, if you're not a neurotic, spaced out parent.
You're meant to dress up, which I couldn't. The little ones did. (A friend spent more than R600 dressing her two children.) Then, at dusk we set off trick or treating to the park.
My little entourage and I found our neighbours bored with celebrating Halloween. We're tired of sharing sweets with strangers who knock on our doors. We did have luck at the house where my eldest daughter was holed up in the garage, pretending to be a corpse.
The park packed tightly with teens, parents and little children on this night, is the setting of all nightmares involving children. How any family can pretend to enjoy the evening sipping wine and eating a picnic while the place is crawling with paedophiles is bizarre. Every adult hanging about there is, of course, looking for prey. Every child looks the same - dressed up in awful horror suits.
Shortly after I had scooped up my son, and removed my other charges from a jumping castle overloaded with rougher and bigger children, I dragged them away from their "fun". I needed to get out of the park quickly.
When I arrived at the haunted house close to tears, to collect my daughter, she was being happily ushered out of the front door with other children. Into. The. Streets. Of. Johannesburg.
All I could do was have a stiff drink and wait anxiously for their return. Fun? No.
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