No, the title is not a typo. When it comes to Halloween, I've been tricked, had, bamboozled, swindled and cheated out of doing anything fun- at least until next year.
I didn't realize that Halloween would lose mostly all of its appeal after my childhood ended.
I actually stopped trick-or-treating at 10, which is about three years younger than the intended age of when you're supposed to top. I'm 20, which means I've spent almost a decade being too old to trick-or-treat and too young to go to 21 and up parties.
I know some of you are going to read this and ask, "What are you talking about? There's plenty that you can do in between." That may be true, but hear me out.
Haunted houses, which are really big fixtures of Halloween for people of all ages, have never appealed to me. When I'm scared, my natural inclination is not to scream and run away. I ended up kicking some poor guy dressed as a ghoul in the shins at the last haunted house I went to. I was only 11, so he was a good sport about it but needless to say, I haven't been back since.
I lived for Halloween parties in my younger years. In my teens, however, I attended two parties that were utterly boring. The children had one area to themselves with all the Halloween candy, party favors and pumpkin pinatas that they could handle.
On the other hand, the older crowd was having a knock-down, drag-out shindig that all the teens and tweens were banned from joining (and rightly so!), which left me in a very weird place; to old for one thing, too young for another.
If you're not going trick-or-treating, to a haunted house or to a party, what else is left?
For most of the past decade, I've spent my Halloweens at home without a costume watching horror movies, eating candy and ordering pizza for a small groups of friends and family. The occasional prank gets pulled, but after a few years, you come to expect shenanigans of some kind to go on. As much as I enjoy this, I'm looking for something new and actually fun for this year's Halloween.