Postponed Trick-or-Treating in the 'burbs

Notes from our town’s freak-winter-storm-rescheduled trick-or-treating the other night:

• The Eldest Boy dressed as what he called “a black market manager” (in other words, a scalper). Here’s what he did: He used clear duct tape to attach ticket stubs, fake credit cards, airline tickets, along with packets of candy and gum on the inside of his bright orange, zip-up hoodie. He donned sunglasses and “bling” and even allowed me to spike his hair with gel. When people asked what he was, he opened up his sweatshirt like he was a flasher only he was giving you a glimpse of his “ill-gotten” goods that he was peddling. (This was all his idea, I swear.) When The Spouse and I suggested he add a watch to his sweatshirt’s inventory, he looked at us quizzically. “Why would I do that?” he asked.
• The Eldest Boy went trick-or-tricking with a group of kids including a boy who dressed up as Red Sox pitcher Josh Beckett: He wore a Beckett jersey and carried and empty beer bottle and a bucket of fried chicken, or so The Eldest Boy told me.
• The Youngest Boy initially wanted to dress up as Plaxico Burress (with hockey padding made to look like football padding, a football jersey and a plastic western-themed pistol strapped to his waist) but I put the kibosh on that whole shooting-himself-in-the-back-of-the-leg-shtick pretty quickly. Instead, he would up going as Arizona NFL player Larry Fitzgerald (only because he borrowed a Fitzgerald jersey from The Eldest Boy) with two thick, black lines under his eyes, also known as eye black.
• The behavior of the trick-or-treaters was better than it was last year. Only one kid complained about the candy I gave him, putting the two packets of Sour Patch Kids I’d given him back into my bowl and instead extracting two bags of Swedish Fish which were more to his liking. Even the sullen teenagers who came to the door were, for the most part, in some sort of costume, as opposed to last year when I sometimes felt as though I was being extorted by burly looking teen boys who just showed up with grungy pillowcases demanding candy.
• Max the dog was a bit more anxious to greet everyone than he has been the past two years. I looked thoroughly awkward when answering the door for those first few trick-or-treaters with one giant bowl of candy in one arm as I tried to keep the door from slamming shut with the other arm while sticking one leg out to prevent Max from cluelessly escaping into the chilly night. I had to put him in his crate until the trick-or-treating was over.
• Speaking of over, the last trick-or-treaters left here at 9:52 p.m. Isn’t that too late to be out? I thought it was. After I gave the late-comers their candy, I was a party pooper and shut off the lights. I was trying to watch the first Harry Potter movie with The Girl, who’d been out trick-or-treating with her friends, and didn’t want to be disturbed anymore, yo. Plus, after four ginormous bags, we were pretty much out of candy anyway.

Now I just have to steel my willpower and pretend that the candy is not in the house, no matter how much it beckons me from the other room.