Today was so depressing.

Trick or treat was this afternoon. I live in a large townhouse complex with tons of kids, and every year I'm overrun by trick-or-treaters. I almost always give out all my candy.

So about an hour before trick-or-treat I emptied all my candy into a bowl and realized I was going to need more. So I ran to the grocery store and bought another bag of candy. I also bough a few packages of raisins. You see, in addition to the small kids, older (14-17 year olds) punks go out collecting candy, and half the time they don't even bother with a costume. That pisses me off... I mean, if you want candy that bad, get a job and buy your own damn candy! Leave the treats for the little kids. Or if you're a real bum, at least put on a mask or something - don't just walk around in jeans and a tee shirt. So, I buy the raisins to give to the older kids. grin I'm so mean. (My parents are worse. They give out packages of three crayons to older kids.)

Well, I made a mistake. I thought that each package had three boxes of raisins in it. But there were six boxes of raisins in each! So I bought 18 boxes of raisins. Yeech.

Anyway, at the appointed hour I got myself gussied up in my black faceless robe thing and my black gloves, and turned on my porch light.

And waited.

And waited.

And waited.

And I was starting to think I had the wrong time. So I checked the newspaper. Nope, I had the right time. I sat back and waited some more, rather despondent.

About an hour after trick-or-treat started, the first kids started to trickle through. It was quite a relief. The littler kids were suitably cowed by my faceless cowl, but I greeted the smallest ones with a bright "Hi there!" That seemed to put them more at ease. There were some tense moments. One Power Ranger held his bucket out as far as his little arm could reach, not wanting to come a step closer to me than he had to. grin

After about half an hour, the trickle of tricksters stopped. I waited some more. No kids. After waiting for half an hour, I gave up and took of my robe.

I have a ton of candy left. I still have 18 boxes of raisins. (Yeech.) The number of kids I had didn't even give my Halloween sound effects CD time to run all the way through! frown

I feel like I threw a party and no one showed up.

I guess I can wear the faceless robe against next year. And I can take the raisins to work. Someone will eat them. And I should have no problem eating all the leftover candy myself. It's still pretty depressing, though. I love Halloween, and Halloween without a flood of trick-or-treaters just doesn't seem right.

In talking to other people in town, I discovered that this year was very light, kid-wise, all over town. So it wasn't just my complex (I thought it was because the office hadn't put out a reminder of trick-or-treat times.) sigh

Oh! I guess you might want to know what I dressed up as to go downtown. (You can read a description of the costume here. It's at the end of that entry.)

Black cat number 13 holding a broken mirror? I was Bad Luck, of course.

Maybe if I dress up as Good Luck next year I'll have more trick-or-treaters.