Halloween is fine as holidays go. It generally lacks the feasting that’s kind of the hallmark of my favorite holidays, but stacking three of those in a row over sequential months is probably overkill. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with Halloween, but gods do I loathe the celebrants who can’t seem to abide by the rules of the road.  

I don’t like people coming to the door at the best of times. Jorah absolutely loses his shit when the doorbell rings, or a car door slams, or he hears voices he can’t identify. The same set of inputs send the cat fleeing to the deepest corners of house to burrow in. George, to his credit, is happily indifferent. Still, that leaves three out of four residents of this house who just don’t want to deal with it.

I do all the things you’re supposed to do when you’re not participating – cut off the porch light, the driveway lights, and even the landscape lighting. Still they came. Two years ago, I even extinguished the itty-bitty light in the doorbell. They still came. Last year I went so far as pulling all the blinds and reduced the interior light to the bare minimum needed to keep reading. Still they came. 

Today I made sure all of the above was done before dark and even added blackout curtains to the side light windows next to the front door in an effort to block out any ambient light that might make its way to the front of the house. By 7 o’clock this evening it will be pitch goddamned black in my front yard. The house is going to look like a hole in the woods. There’s not a thing about it that’ll look inviting. Still, I expect, they’ll come… and stand in the dark utterly confused when there’s no doorbell to ring. Short of posting sentries at the end of the driveway, I don’t know how else to convey my intent. 

Simply wanting to be left alone in peace in your own home shouldn’t require this level of effort. A thinking person could have picked up on the signs when I turned the porch light off… so I suspect what we really have is at least some number of people wandering around feeling awfully entitled to other people’s time and attention. Basically, behaving the same way they do the other 364 days of the year.

In conclusion, if you wouldn’t encourage your darling children to take candy from a stranger in a van, you probably shouldn’t encourage them to visit my blacked-out house.