THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, October 27, 1995 TAG: 9510270637
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: GUY FRIDDELL
LENGTH: Medium: 57 lines
The nation's nutritionists, bless their naive souls, want to substitute pretzels and packets of instant oatmeal for Halloween treats.
If anything would return Halloween to our grandfathers' day when youths hoisted carriages atop barns, it would be to offer them a packet of instant oatmeal instead of jelly jujubes or whatever.
My father-in-law told me many a time how he and his friends used to collect trash barrels from around the neighborhood, build them into a towering pyramid and set it afire.
It lit the night sky like something fearful out of the Old Testament. And what householders said at finding their barrels going up in flames brought to mind the Apocalypse.
He recalled that bonfire, wistfully, as if he would like to do it again were it not that wooden barrels had gone out of style, as with so many of the dear old ways.
If the nutritionists are out to pit one generation against another, let them, when children throng around with open sacks, toss in some pretzels. There will be mass rebellion.
To receive a tiny box of raisins in lieu of a lollipop would be like getting a ``useful'' present from Santy instead of a wind-up toy - to find in the toe of one's sock hung by the chimney with care a pair of socks.
Bagels and sunflower seeds are also among the preferred treats.
Next thing, they will be foisting on us carrot sticks, tied with a bow, or a serving of tofu, a concoction that has not confronted me as yet, nor do I want it to, much as I hate to end a sentence with a preposition.
Oh, they mean well. (Any time anybody says not to mind, a person with fire in his eye and an axe in his hand means well, you can bet you are going to get it in the neck in the name of reform.)
Non-candy snack foods are becoming a new trick-or-treat tradition, says the Snack Food Association, echoed by the National Potato Promotion Board.
Edith Hogan of the American Dietetic Association, cited a government report that the number of overweight children had more than doubled in 30 years. The holiday is the perfect time to teach youngsters about healthful eating, she said.
All right, health peddlers have a point. At the bottom of any contentious soul, you find self. Let me confess. Here's what really bothers me.
Nothing is more haunting than to run out of treats on Halloween and face a tyke, with an expectant face, holding open a sack into which one has nothing left to dump.
So, in desperate forays around stores before dark on Halloween, one buys far more than one needs to propitiate the little hobgoblins.
Over a week or so, one may munch one's way through leftover candy. I simply do not have the capacity of a horse to do away with all that roughage, sensible though it is. by CNB