Halloween – Because carving patterns into squash, lighting them on fire and leaving them on your front door step makes perfect sense.

A recent study has shown that the United States of America is only second in the world when it comes to official recognition of meaningless holidays such as Halloween. The country which actually leads the world in meaningless holidays is a tiny tropical island in the South Pacific.

“Hey, Zoonunga, another three day weekend. I love National Hamster Recognition Day.”

“Yes, Matundish, but I especially enjoy Inny Belly Button Hero Week.”

“I always forget… Is that before or after the Festival of the Killer Bees?”

Of course these survey results would be even more meaningful if I hadn’t just made them up. But the fact remains that here in the United States we have an obsession with celebrating nothing, and Halloween is no exception.

Halloween dates all the way back to 1964 when the Hershey Chocolate Company pulled a masterful advertising campaign which claimed: “Our chocolate is so good, it brings the dead back to life.”

The height of the campaign featured Milton S. Hershey himself, which was appropriate seeing how Milton had actually died in 1945. These were before the days of computer animation so the company actually dug up Milton’s corpse and made it do a little jig on the Ed Sullivan Show in Weekend at Bernie’s fashion until its legs fell off and they had to cut back to some second-rate band from Liverpool.

Though the ad campaign was in bad taste (the slogan, not the candy), the idea of ghosts, goblins, and glucose caught on and became another part of our rich (and totally senseless) American culture.

I came from a family where holidays were given a strange sort of importance akin to the Pope stopping by for Sunday dinner or the moon crashing into the earth. We celebrated Thanksgiving by dressing up like our favorite Pilgrim or Indian, we actually went to work on Labor Day, and members of my family have been known to get teary-eyed on Ground Hog’s Day. Halloween, of course, was no different

A week or so before Halloween my family would drive out to the local farmer’s market to look for the “perfect pumpkin.” We would never find the pumpkin, of course, because by October 20th the farmer’s market has all its Christmas decorations on display and has a small room of Valentine’s decorations ready to go. At this point we would head over to the nearby grocery store and root through their dumpster until we found a pumpkin that is generally in one piece and only has a few pathes of mold. On years when we couldn’t find a pumpkin my father would arrive home a day later with an out of season watermelon that had been spray-painted orange. We kids pretended not to notice.

When the big night arrived we would place the pumpkin in the center of the dining room table and plan our attack. We strategized where we can cut in the eyes, nose and mouth and what sort of expression our vegetable icon would have after we had taken a multitude of blades and utensils to it.

And while other families may argue and fight over what they want, our family always worked like a well-oiled machine on Halloween. It seems that my family bonds best with sharp knives and an outlet for violence.

The actual Jack–O–Lantern process resembled a crew of blind monkeys trying to perform a lobotomy. While our father scalped the orange gourd and began pulling out its cerebellum while, we stood back and said things like “Oooo” and “Gross, Dad.” This was our official function.

When most of the gunk (scientific term) had been yanked from the head, our father would hand us a spoon and tells us to scoop away. We would then scrape and dig in the pumpkin with the fervor that can only be found in holiday hyped children. The surgery complete, we gathered around the hollow head and sketched a face on the vegetable. Again my father would pull out a large sharp knife and instead of brain surgery he’d perform plastic surgery. Twenty minutes of carving produced amazing results.

“That’s a pretty ugly face, Dad.”

“Yep. Looks like your mother when she gets up in the morning.”

It is comments like this which always earned my father the privilege of taking the screaming kids Trick-or-Treating later in the evening. Before terrorizing the neighborhood we placed a candle in the pumpkin and dropped the flaming monstrosity on our front porch so that it may be smashed by roving hoodlums during the night.

Trick-or-Treating was a very straightforward affair in my neighborhood in the early 1980s. All the girls would dress up as Strawberry Shortcake or Teenage Hookers and all the boys would dress up as Luke Skywalker or Superman, depending on hair color.

We’d gather at a predetermined spot and plan our path of pillaging and progress from porch to porch. Between houses we’d take nibbles from our candy caches and by the end of the night have empty bags and enough sugar coursing through a veins that each of us had the energy 20 kids and moved around like a midget speed freaks.

Of course, with energy came tension.

“Only sissies wear tights!” a Luke Skywalker would scream.

“Oh yeah? Well at least my father isn’t a bad guy!” argued back a Superman.

“He’s not my father!”

“Is too!”

“Is not!”

“Is too!”

It wouldn’t take too long for the Luke Skywalkers to attack the Supermen with long sticks which doubled as lightsabers during galactic times of trouble. The Supermen would return the favor by taking off their capes and using them as bright red whips. The movies would have been much more interesting if they were written by a bunch of candy wired kids.

Eventually the high would wear off and we’d crash to the ground as did our blood sugar. There we’d rest – bruised and bloody, sick to our stomachs and with barely enough strength to lift our little costumed bodies off the cold, wet ground. Sometimes our conversations would turn to girls (the Hookers were always more popular), but mostly we just argued over whether or not a lightsaber could really hurt the Man of Steel.

Finally my father and the other parents would find us and haul back home for a treatment of sugar detox. And just as I was about to drift into a sleep filled with sugar-induced nightmares I’d think back on the night and immediately begin plotting what I want to dress up as next time…

You know, for Thanksgiving.

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Caring for a newborn baby is kind of like caring for a bag full of beef jerky, except the beef jerky is slightly more aware of your existence.

For the first couple of weeks newborn babies generally do the following in no particular order:

1. Cry.
2. Eat.
3. Poop.
4. Trick you into thinking they are sleeping, but the minute you close your own eyes they want to do one of the previous three items.

This roast chicken reacts to your presence a little more than your newborn baby…and is slightly better tasting.

After several weeks of taking care of a baby who doesn’t really know you from the light switch you begin to get a little bored with the whole cry/poop/eat thing and begin to look forward to the days when baby is more “fun” and can do important things like smile or, the holiest of holy grails, sleep for four hours straight.

This leads to games you invent to play with your baby. Just because your baby is not much more than a cute and cuddly human-shaped pork roast doesn’t mean you can’t have all sorts of fun with the little bugger. Here are a few games my wife and I have invented over the past few sleep deprived weeks:

Baby Diaper Roulette: You and your partner take turns changing baby’s diaper, hoping and praying for a “wet” one instead of an “explosive poo” one. Ideally, you and your partner can trade bargains for changing a diaper. So, if I think the baby’s butt has exploded I can tell my wife, “Dear, I’ll do the dishes for a week if you change this next diaper.” If she agrees and there’s a poop in the diaper, then I win. Sure, I’ll have to do dishes for a week, but trust me, I still win. An alternative version of this game requires you to record who gets “shot” with the most poopy diapers each day and the person with the higher score gets to sleep in the car all night where it’s nice and peaceful.

Avoid the Fire Hose: Played with little boys. You can probably figure this one out. Wearing a raincoat while changing diapers is cheating.

Sleeping Baby Bomb: You rock the baby to sleep in your arms and then try to place the baby into his crib and sneak out of his room without disturbing him. This is much, much harder than it sounds. The teeniest false move or squeaky floorboard could cause baby to “explode” in a scream of dissatisfaction that will cost you another 30 minutes of rocking baby back to sleep.

Baby Coffee in a rousing game of Baby Prop.

Sleep Four Hours in a Row: This is a fantasy game where you imagine you can get a sane amount of sleep. It is, of course, completely impossible to do with a newborn.

Baby Prop: In this game you simply use the baby as an inanimate object for wacky photos and video clips. This includes dressing baby is silly costumes, putting silly things in baby’s hands and placing baby in inappropriate places such as carved out pumpkins, golf bags and microwaves.

All the top pediatricians agree that playing games with your baby is very important to his or her mental and social development. Of course, those same top pediatricians would immediately and urgently retract that statement if they ever read this blog.

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Go ahead… guess how much…

I hate carrying spare change. This fact will be important in a moment.

In addition to having a new baby in the house, I’m sort of changing job positions. I’m cleaning out my desk and moving from one building in my company to another building in my company. I’ll have slightly different duties, but otherwise everything else is pretty much staying the same.

I’ve been at this same job for four and a half years. During those four and a half years I’ve bought a lot of lunches and plugged a lot of dollar bills into the vending machines. As a result of this, I’ve received back quite a lot of spare change which, as I said, I hate carrying around. So I used to just throw into my desk drawer and forget about it. This continued for about a year before I noticed that each time I opened my desk drawer it sounded very much like the cash register ka-ching of Pink Floyd’s Money.

It was a pleasant reminder of exactly why I was showing up for work each day, but it started to make me feel as though I was working in a toll booth.

At the time I was too lazy to take the spare change home and roll it, so I found an empty Altoids box in the back of my drawer (I have a hard time throwing away anything made of metal, go figure) and tossed some of the extra coins into that. Then I found another one and did it again. Pretty soon I was eating Altoids and generating spare change at about the same pace, so whenever I finished off a box of Altoids (once every other month or so) I’d fill it with change from my drawer and stack it on my shelf.

It is silly office games like this that keep you sane some days.

Now, four and a half years later, I am cleaning out my desk for my move and I have amassed 21 Altoid Boxes filled with spare change. Each box weighs over a pound and each box has about, well… I have no idea how much money in it. Sadly, these boxes are about the only concrete accomplishment I can point to for the entire time I’ve worked at this company.

Instead of moving the 21 Altoid Boxes of spare change, I have elected to dump all the change and start from scratch in my new position.

So that’s what I’ve done. I’ve dumped them right into a coin counting machine at my local bank and come up with the answer to an age-old question:

How much money can be collected in 21 Altoid Boxes filled with spare change?

Answer: $238.90

Now you know.

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