Signs Of Lean Times

You know times are tough when your classroom is not littered with Halloween candy wrappers on November 1st.

This is kind of a first. Where are the Dum Dum sticks, the Tootsie Roll wrappers, the Skittles bags, the Nerds boxes? My desks were not stuffed with sweet-tooth trash today. In fact, I found nary a scrap. No Smarties on the floor. Nothing. It was like a regular day. Better than a regular day!

I blame the economy. I certainly heard kids talk about going out trick-or-treating yesterday, even though they tower near the six-foot mark. Childhood is a tough place to leave. They already had costumes, by cracky. But I guess folks couldn't afford to hand out a lot of treats. So the kids must have eaten their meager take, or left it at home instead of sharing it around for brief classroom popularity. Or the bowl of hand-out candy at home was depleted, and they had no leftovers to bring.

It seems the tricks were curtailed, too. I passed nary a TP-ed yard on my 30-minute drive to work. Have you seen the price of toilet paper down at The Devil's Playground? No soaped windows. Not even smashed pumpkins. Did meanness take a holiday as well? Or did the bad apples turn into good eggs because they know how much folks had to fork over for those pumpkins?

Times. They have a-changed.