Halloween Scrooge

My street; where I won't be popular.

I love Autumn:  leaves of gorgeous golds and burgundies, crisp cool weather, sweaters, apples and pumpkins!  However,  I kind of hate Halloween.  Hate is too strong a word.  I don't mind the spooky stories and haunted houses and people getting really into their costumes.  That's fun!  But I hate the commercial aspect of it, the way it feeds children's greed for junkie sugary stuff.  We've got juvenile diabetes and cancer on the rise, folks.  There might be a reason for that!  Halloween seems to start earlier and earlier each year.  I heard one young mother bemoaning the fact that her kids had to miss the trick or treat at the local shopping mall due to a conflict.  Their other seasonal festivities included the Halloween party at their school, the trunk or treat at their church, as well as neighborhood Halloween party and yes, trick or treating on the actual night.  This is going overboard in my opinion. We are poisoning ourselves to death with candy.  We get sick and the corporations who own chocolate (I think there are 3 or 4 huge multinationals that basically control the chocolate in the world) get richer.

I hate to be a party pooper but honestly we are lemmings, we are like the Roman citizens who don't mind being treated like slaves as long as we get our bread and circuses.

I live with someone from Cote D'Ivoire.  I don't have time to cite various reports right now on this blog, but these huge cocoa companies are responsible for deforestation and child slavery in that country.  It is exploitative colonialism all over again.  But it's ok because we are addicted to chocolate and our own pleasure and screw the rest the world!  Leave me alone in my little bubble please!!!  I don't wanna disappoint my spoiled rotten kids who have come to expect to be showered in junk candy from October through January (a little reprieve and then on to Valentine's Day!!!).  And that's why it's ok to let little children be kidnapped and forced to work 12 hour days doing the dangerous work of growing chocolate for us.  Let them be beaten and half starved to death.  And they never eat the chocolate themselves.  Never!

I tried to order Equal Exchange chocolate last month but for some reason the order didn't properly go through and I never followed up.  I've done a little research and it looks like Lindt Chocolate, a Swiss company is more conscientious than say Hershey and Nestle.  Lindt only buys cocoa from South America (or maybe Central America?) where there is far less child slavery.  They do source some cocoa from Ghana but they don't buy on the commodities market, but source from specific farms where they know the working conditions.

So I am going to get some Lindt chocolates.  To cut on down on the plastic wrapper waste (a whole other ball of wax - how much trash gets generated by Halloween??) I plan to mix in some things like pencils or some other fun little things I can find that aren't plastic or junky and might have some real use.  I did see someone's pinterest idea of coloring little jack o lantern faces on clementines.  I might do that.  Assuming parents will let their kids eat the clementines.  I won't be the most popular house on the block.  But I don't care, frankly!