Fat Girl's Halloween Oath

My Little Pumpkins: So delicious they're a little concerned Mommy will eat them.

I love Halloween. It's an enchanted time, when people temporarily cast aside social propriety, modest clothing and resistance to the supernatural. It's a time to embrace one's inner witch or warlock, feline familiar, or slutty cab driver. Time to go nuts with the spookiest and cheesiest yard decor available, and gleefully take a butcher knife and flame to the nearest unsuspecting gourd.

But in one way it really is scary as hell. Every year, this is the beginning of the unraveling of whatever healthy habits I may have been developing in the previous months, lost to a frenzy of candy wrapper ripping and chocolate rationalizations (they're like regular rationalizations, but soooo delicious).

Halloween seems to be my gateway drug. What starts in mid-October with me picking up a bag of tootsie rolls "for the kids," culminates three days after Thanksgiving with eating pumpkin pie and chocolate cake directly out of the refrigerator in the middle of the night without a fork, glancing around furtively like a starving hyena.

It's been a rough year for self-care, and I am just finding my way back to the gym and developing something of a fitness a routine. I don't want Halloween to be the beginning of the downhill slide for me this year. So with my hand on a bag of caramel rice cakes, I solemnly swear that this year will be different.

• This year, I will not purchase six large bags of candy for the four trick-or-treaters who visit our door every year.
• I will not "sample" the candy I purchase, or the candy my kids collect, to "test it for quality."
• Once Fozzie Bear has fallen asleep in the stroller, I will not continue to collect candy in his bucket "to keep things fair"
• I will acknowledge that I do not burn off enough calories walking from one house to the next to justify eating 17 pieces of candy at the end of the night.
• The best way to get treats out of the house is to give them to charity, or send them to Hubs' work break room, not to put them in my mouth.
• I will set aside a publicly identified number of candies for the boys to enjoy in the days following Halloween. These will be kept behind a locked door requiring two keys and dual thumbprint identification. They will be distributed when the entire family is present, counted and weighed for accuracy, and given only after vegetables have been consumed. No tantrums will be tolerated. The kids should behave themselves, too.
• For the next sixty days, before consuming any sugary treats, I will require myself to do the "Truffle Shuffle" in front of a full-length mirror. This should not only curb any appetite for sweets, it will also create a state of Goonies-based nostalgic ecstasy. Those trigger the same hormones in the brain, right?



Hubs' Spook-o-Lantern: Awesome even in a chocolate withdrawal rage

• Without a steady supply of chocolate, I become enraged and unpredictable. This year I will channel that terrible power into working out and NaNoWriMo, rather than my usual habit of screaming obscenities at other drivers on the road and noticing out loud every single thing that Hubs does sub-optimally. I will not behave in a way that causes my acquaintances to throw Reese's cups at me as a distraction while they make a hasty escape. 

Well, I think that about covers it. Here's a friggin' cute picture of Monkey and Fozzie picking out our pumpkin, and the super-spooky result Hubs created.

Happy Halloween!