This week’s blog post is by WDP co-host Matt Rocco, who lives in the Edgewater Glen neighborhood of Chicago, a veritable Trick-or-Treating mecca, with his non-white, non-dad wife, Professor Foster, and their daughter Viva.
My neighborhood, and my street in particular, is a very popular trick-or-treating spot, both for neighborhood kids and for greedy little Halloween carpetbaggers who come in vans from all over the city to stuff their novelty fang-wearing faces on our High Fructose Corn Syrup hoard. The average participating home on our street gives out more than 1,200 pieces of candy on a good year.
But this year wasn’t a good year. This year, it rained.
What happens when it rains on trick or treating? Halloween is a holiday with no master -it’s not a government holiday, it’s not a religious holiday (unless you are some kind of Druid or something, in which case you aren’t reading this because you’re slitting a goat’s throat on a slab on the moors somewhere), it’s a loner, Dottie, a rebel. It’s off the grid. That means no rain checks. It means if the sky opens up, you get one less trick-or-treating out of the only 10 or so life affords to a child.
Your little Iron Man stayed in and rusted? Your tiny Wonder Woman’s invisible jet was grounded? Your friendly neighborhood White Dads are here with the solution: This year, celebrate “Thanksoween”!
Thanksoween is the new holiday that will take place on Thanksgiving Day on years Halloween is rainy. It’s the Turducken of holidays -one delicious juicy holiday jammed inside another!
The rules are simple -on Thanksgiving afternoon, dress your child up like a Pilgrim and send them door to door, begging for stuffing! (And turkey and pumpkin pie, anything the neighbors can spare.)
Let’s lay out the benefits:
Your children get to play dress up, and in the process, role play as this country’s pre-Founding Fathers founders -religious wackos in buckled shoes who were lousy at farming and bent on genocide against the natives (save for one friendly dinner).
You can get rid of some of those pesky leftovers! No more dry white mean and greasy dark meat sandwiches till December! No more stinky carcass soup! (And think of the lucky kid who gets a carcass slid into his Thanksoween bag!)
You get to kick the kids out of the house for two hours and watch football.
Once Thanksoween gets big in this country, there’ll be no stopping it! Four rows of Pilgrim costumes and thermal meat-treat sacks in the Target seasonal aisle! Kids who know which houses gives out grapy green beans (that don’t even have those crunchy onion things on top), and which is the awesome house that dumps entire cans of that jellied cranberry stuff into the bags with one big wiggly dog-foody plop!
Choose your costumes now! My wife and I are going as Pocahontas and John Smith, and dressing the baby as Pocahontas’s famous and historically accurate raccoon sidekick.
Oh, and Thanksoween is not just for kids! Want to have a “sexy” costume? Who is sexier than America’s first bad girl, Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne? (meow) Your entire sorority can go as Abigail Williams and her sultry band of teen witches from the Crucible! Naughty, naughty, naughty!
Need couples costumes? How about lovelorn John Alden and irresistable Puritan Priscilla Mullins from Longfellow’s “The Courtship of Miles Standish”?
Got a group? Go as the signers of the Mayflower Compact, one of our nation’s first governing documents.
Here’s a great Thanksoween group costume: Zombie Lost Colony of Roanoke!
So, this year, give the family the experience they missed on our rainy Halloween. I’ll see you this Thanksoween on the neighbor’s porch, and instead of “Trick or Treat!’ we’ll shout, “I spy leftovers, Goody Neighbor! ‘Tis Thanksoween!”
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