Week 249: Halloween, Candy, and Jokes

I do believe Halloween was this last weekend. I also believe that Sam and Mandy enjoyed it immensely. Ger’s dad and godmother came to stay at our house and answer our door for us so that we all four could go out trick-or-treating.

Sam insisted on trying to hit every door in our substantial neighborhood, including the ones where all the lights were off and no decorations were up. As I think I’ve mentioned before for some reason the ritual of trick-or-treating in this neck of the woods has evolved to include telling jokes, which I guess is supposed to be some kind of “treat” though if my understanding of Boolean logic as it applies to the holiday’s catch phrase is correct this would mean that telling a joke means you forfeit your rights to candy. But nobody seemed to agree with me, AS USUAL.

Be that as it may, we had attempted to prime Samantha with some canned jokes that she could use for this purpose. What is a bow that cannot be tied? A rainbow. What building has the most stories? The library. What’s green and red and goes 100 miles per hour? A frog in a blender.

Samantha, showing her usual Olympic level skill in not doing what you tell her, decided to instead make up jokes on the spot, with the spot being the welcome mat of whatever neighbor she had just marched up to. Only she didn’t operate too well under that kind of pressure, so she just assembled jokes like Frankenstein’s monster out of words for whatever raw materials happen to by lying around. Why did the …car, cross the …pumpkin? Because the …door! HAHAHAHAHACANDY! Ironically, this usually elicited more laughter than the jokes we had taught her, which actually only encouraged her.

Mandy spent most of the evening confined to her stroller and clutching her jack-o-lantern bucket, though we did occasionally let her out or wheel her op to doorjambs to receive her share of the treats. For the most part she was happy to alternately squish and examine her treats, but at one point while walking between houses I overheard a quiet “OM NOM NOM NOM!” sound. I looked down to see Mandy chewing on something and quickly demanded “Mandy! What do you have in your mouth?”

She looked up at me, more than a little surprised and eventually answered “Candy?” I think she just barely lacked the verbal skills to add “You imbecile, what else would it be? You keep giving me the stuff, what am I supposed to do with it?” At any rate, her clever little fingers had figured out how to unwrap one of the treats, and she had even neatly put the wrapper back in her bucket, possibly for later consumption.

So yeah, we had fun.

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