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From 5:30pm to 8:30pm last night^[1]Which was, we real­ized, the 25^th anniver­sary of the day we moved into the house, we had 16 trick-or-treaters show up at our place.

• Har­le­quin with a lit­tle hat
• Pig (he wore a burlap over­all and had quite the full-head mask going on)
• Pikachu (it was her first Hal­lowe’en; when her mom said “What do you say?” her first guess was “Can­dy please?”)
• A giant black dot
• The Phan­tom of the Opera
• Teen who likes can­dy ×2
• Skull-faced clown
• Zom­bie mobster
• Deliv­ery dri­vers who brought us our tor­ta ×2
• Stitch
• Dead­pool
• Min­ions ×2
• Vam­pire

We turned off the light about 9:20pm, and we’ve got a bunch of can­dy left.

“Explain,” said the inter­ro­ga­tion machine. “Describe their culture.”

“They have an impor­tant cel­e­bra­tion,” said E.T., “called Hol­low Bean. Every­one carves faces in fruit squash­es and dress­es up in sheets.”

“Who holds this celebration?”

“The chil­dren, who actu­al­ly rule the Blue Plan­et of Earth. They are more intel­li­gent than the old­er peo­ple and out­run them on bicycles.”

The machine whirled around him again. “And what is the pur­pose of this celebration?”

“To col­lect the all-impor­tant food.”

“Which is?”

“Can­dy.”

—William Kotzwin­kle, E.T. The Book of the Green Plan­et. 1985, Berke­ley Books.

Hap­py Hol­low Bean, every­one! And b. good.

Pho­to by Zdeněk Macháček on Unsplash.