Robbie (00:00)
Welcome to the show everyone. Happy Halloween Eve. Hope that everyone's having a fantastic day, getting ready for Halloween. This episode's coming out the day before Halloween. We're ready here, we're excited if you can't tell by the orange shirt, the skeleton mask just chilling on the bed back there. I mean my family's really been ready for Halloween for like two months now. But we can finally get to enjoy the season. It's not 145 fucking degrees anymore. It's cold outside this morning, I went outside.

39 degrees outside. It was fucking glorious. It was great. I enjoyed the cool weather Time to get some apple pies bacon some pumpkin pies bacon whether or not you like either one of those me personally unpopular opinion here I'm not the biggest fan of pumpkin pie or everything pumpkin flavored like I like some of it But it's really not my favorite. I'm more of like a pecan pie person or apple pie I'll do the pumpkin pie just for Halloween just for Thanksgiving, but

We're excited about this season. My kids have been watching Halloween movies for about a month, month and a half now. We didn't decorate until September 15th, even though was still like 110 degrees outside. We were putting up Halloween decorations and we're just ready for it. I hope that you're all ready for it too. I love Halloween. I did an episode last year about Halloween, spooky season, If you listen to that.

you'll know that my family loves it. Me and my wife, we're both big into the holidays, especially Halloween and Christmas. Those are our two big ones. Those are the ones that we love the most that we love to decorate for, that we like to get all those foods for, the specialty drinks. So we're excited. I'm happy that Halloween is finally here and my kids are just ready to go, ready to trick or treat. My two year old's old enough to actually get out of the wagon this year and go knock on the door and say trick or treat. He's excited. We've been doing walks every single night through the neighborhood.

looking at all the decorations, mapping out our route, making sure we know where to get the best candy. And that's just a long intro to say, happy Halloween, everyone. I hope that you and your family have a great time. If you don't have a family, if you're younger, I hope that you enjoy Halloween, go to the parties, go to the drinking, whatever it is, it's just a great time to celebrate and have fun.

And yeah, there's a lot of reasons why I like Halloween. Personally, me personally, I really like haunted houses, getting scared, not like really getting scared. I've never really been super afraid to go into these haunted houses or different theme parks that have haunted places and you know, people dressed up in masks, sliding on the ground, scaring you with sparks and shit like that. All of that has never like truly scared me, but I get, you know, jump scares and things like that. But I really just, like the feeling I like.

going into those haunted houses. I like watching scary movies. I like trying to basically like scare myself. And sometimes it does. I'd be lying if I sat here and there haven't been times where I've been like in the dark or out in the backyard when it's dark and kind of eerie out and haven't had these flashbacks of these things in my head, like a vampire movie or a werewolf or some fucking thing that's gonna come and eat me, right? I'd be lying if I said that those don't creep into mind, but I enjoy.

watching those things. like the Halloween time. I even like all the little kids stuff and I'm trying to pass down that enjoyment of the holiday to my kids, to my family, not necessarily the scary spooky stuff. And that's kind of what I wanted to talk about. There's a few things that I wanted to talk about today. I'm already just off in the weeds talking about random things. going to be one of those episodes where I just go in a billion different directions. But for this first part, I wanted to kind of talk about raising kids.

and how not to make them really afraid of Halloween or decor or things like that. I know that there are a lot of kids that that are afraid that will go out and see all of the Halloween decorations or people in masks and they're afraid and that's a natural response. Halloween can be a very morbid holiday and it can be very, very scary. That's what it's for. It's there to be scary, spooky, eerie, all of these things.

If you don't approach it right with your kids, they're going to be terrified going out on Halloween or seeing the Halloween decorations. And even if you do handle it right, they could still be absolutely terrified. And that's an OK thing for them to be right there. It's all right for them to be afraid when they go out. If there's animatronics that move and jump out at you and scare you, it's all right for kids to get scared of that. And it's understandable. No amount of logic is going to change them and tell them

it's just props, it's just make believe they're not going to be able to really truly process that in their heads when they see all of these scary things out there. But I do have a theory on how you can best prepare your kids for all of these different Halloween decor, Halloween movies, and have them actually enjoy it as opposed to getting scared to it. And it's actually something that sometimes is difficult for me as a parent because I do love the holiday and I like playing pranks and trying to scare people and

all that stuff, but when the kids are really little, my theory is that you don't want to act like the stuff is scary and you don't want to scare them with it, right? You don't want to take masks for, for example, masks can be really creepy, really triggering. Kids can be really afraid, especially when they can't see your face. My theory is, that you show them the masks, but you don't try to purposefully scare them with them. You don't like put them on, hide around a corner and then pop out and go, boom, motherfucker gotcha.

Right? You don't do that stuff. You try to like expose them to it and then like laugh with them, make them laugh, make them realize that it's not real. Let them see your face underneath it. And you just have to act like all of this stuff is normal, happy, and not necessarily super scary in order to get them acclimated to these things. And then that way, when they see them out there and when it is a little bit more spooky or a little bit more scary, or people are trying to actually scare them with them, you can go back to this.

safe space that they have with you as a parent where they've seen all these Halloween decorations, they've seen the spooky mask, they've seen the flying skeleton or the ghost or any of this thing, but they also have seen them being non-threatening or not scary and they're there with you as a parent and they know that they're safe with all of those things and it hasn't worked completely, right? My five-year-old, he still gets scared when he sees shit out in the streets or...

If something jumps out at him, he'll get scared or there's a couple of houses that have really spooky life-size people up at their doors. And he's like, I don't necessarily want to sugar treat there. And that's fine. But for the most part, that kid loves Halloween. He loves all the decorations. He's putting the mask on and trying to scare his mom in like a loving and fun way, scare his little brother. They have all the skeletons out, little Halloween toys, man, even stuffed animals that

are like Jack Skellington and Zero and Sally and Oogie Boogie all over the place. But I really do think that acclimating kids to all of the stuff that goes on with Halloween and letting them associate all of this stuff with like the loving safety of being at home with their parents is going to help them.

process it and then realize that these things aren't necessarily inherently scary, evil or anything like that. They're just decorations and it's how individual people utilize them or how they're set up that could be a little bit more scary or could scare me in the moment. But it's not something that I have to be scared of long term. And that's just my child psychology for the day. What I wanted to talk about is certain aspect that I think it's true. I'm not 100 % sure. We'll see.

Like I said, my five year old, he still gets a little scared. My two year old, fearless, he loves them. He sees like the 12 foot skeletons and he lovingly refers to every skeleton as guy guy. That's what they're called. They're called guy guys. So we walk, we go down the street and he's just like guy guy, guy guy, guy guy. And he's excited for it. So we're all excited for Halloween. Gonna go out, see all the decorations, trick or treat, candy, give out candy at our house. We've got

all the decorations set up at our house. We've got some skeletons, some Adirondack chairs that are waving hi to people. This year I'm setting up, we have a big window in my front yard that looks out to the street and I got a projector and we're gonna be playing some Halloween movies like Nightmare Before Christmas and a few other ones that just project it onto the window so you can see it from the street and when you're walking up to our front door to go trick or treating. we're excited about it. I love Halloween.

I love this time of year and I really hope that my kids continue to enjoy it as much as they do right now.

And we got really lucky with the neighborhood that we're in. My neighborhood goes all out. There's a haunted house down the street and lots of 12 foot skeletons. There's the 13 foot singing Jack Skellington, light up zeros, horses, pirate ships, all that stuff. it's the neighborhood gets kind of crazy on Halloween night. People will drive in to come trick or treating our neighborhood. And I really like.

that it is such a big thing out here because I think it's a good family experience for everyone, for my kids, for me, and just like a good community, a good community event.

And I mentioned it last year and I think it's worth mentioning again this year because I got to see it firsthand again on that ring on the app. Now we had someone actually handing out candy for most of the time last year. We designated someone to stay home and we took turns switching out and going trick or treating with the kids. But someone was actually handing out candy. But when it got later and I was putting my kids to bed and everyone had gone home, I decided to just put the bull out in front of the in front of the front door.

let people come take it. And again, it was just disappointment on society, on humanity, on the people that were coming up. I had parents coming up, showing their kids, like take the candy bowl and dump all the candy in their bag. Teenagers, younger kids, everyone just grabbing it and throwing it in there. And I didn't really give a shit as much this year at that point, because it was later I wanted to go to bed and I didn't want the candy around. So I ate it and

just got fat as shit off of it. And I think I'll probably do the same this year. The more annoying thing was just the fact that they were such animals about it and like tearing into the bowl candy all over the place. I'm pretty sure I had a Snickers bar up in my fucking roof. It was just, it was chaos and also disappointing for the people that come next to come to a bowl that doesn't have any candy in it, right? Kids that are really excited about trick or treating. And it's still just

is very disheartening to me that when people, adults, kids, anyone, when society doesn't feel like anyone's looking that they can get away with it or just that they should even act like that, that there's permission to act like that. The parents is the most disappointing. It's like, dude, no wonder why your kids are little fucking animals because you're showing them, you're teaching them this shit. Is candy really that important to you? Is that really what the holiday is about is getting as much candy as you possibly can?

Yeah, when you're a little kid, you try to do that, but you gotta do it the good old fashioned way. You don't go to a house and dump all the candy and then call it good. That's not how you do it. When I was a kid, you needed to make sure that you had a badge of honor that I walked around my entire neighborhood and trick or treated all these houses and filled my bag with candy the good old hard working way, one little candy bar at a time.

So I'm hoping that this year maybe there's a little bit of a change and there's not really much that I can, not much that I can do about it. I'm just mentioning it again because it's another year down where I did notice that just this behavior, this abysmal behavior that happens sometimes during Halloween where people will act like this for what? For candy? I mean, get the fuck out of here. It's just stupid. Parents, teach your kids better. Teach them better than that.

You know, on the topic of candy and getting as much candy as you possibly can and all that good stuff that kids try to do, right? They want chocolate, they want candy, they want to eat it all. But cavities are a big problem. Sugar rush is a big problem. And I also don't want my kid to eat 20 pounds of candy. We've seen this thing called the switch, which where essentially you leave like a bag of candy out on your front porch and the switch, which comes and.

swaps it out for a toy that the kid wants. And my wife and I are kind of debating whether or not we should do that, whether or not, you know, we think that that's a good thing to promote within our family. We haven't come to a decision yet. Our kids already have so many fucking toys there, get spoiled rotten there, you know, on both sides of the family. My eldest is the, was the first grandkids on both sides of our family. And so he's just constantly, everyone's getting him

toys, presents, birthday parties are just ridiculous, know, mounds of stuff that we don't fucking need, that we don't have space for. And so not really sure if I want to do another another toy, but it's it's definitely something to consider whether or not that's good for your family, whether or not you want to implement this idea of the switch, which where, you know, you give your candy to this, this witch and then they bring you a toy in return. You're making a fair exchange for it. So something to consider.

I'm not sure yet what we're gonna do, but maybe if you have any ideas on that, send me a message, let me know, because I'm still trying to determine whether we wanna go that route.

But yeah, Halloween, it's great. I really enjoy it. And I hope that you're all gonna enjoy it as well. This episode, I almost didn't get it out because it's been really busy. This week's been really hectic. Dentist appointments for my kids and doctor's appointments and then work. My wife's work and just now that my kid's in public school for certain things, he's not necessarily in school the whole day trying to take care of him. There's just been a lot to juggle.

and a lot of different events that have been happening. And so I really just wanted to make sure for consistency sake that I was getting something out there because I do see that there are more people listening to the podcast on a consistent basis. And I really appreciate it. I hope that you're getting something from it that I'm providing you with either information or a laugh or whatever the fuck it is that you come here to listen, even if it's just you're here to support me, then that's great. I really appreciate all of that. And so I wanted to make sure I got something out today.

Even it's not necessarily my best work if I didn't have a lot of time to prepare for it. If I'm just sitting here in my stupid pumpkin shirt talking about random shit.

And I think that I'm gonna wrap this episode up relatively quickly, but I did wanna do something that I haven't done in a while, and that is my unhinged rants. I've got an unhinged rant for Halloween. I didn't have it last year, because I didn't see the movie yet, but I'm gonna go ahead and jump into that, and then I'm gonna let you guys enjoy your Halloween.

Now a certain aspect of Halloween that I really enjoy is all of the different movies. I already mentioned scary movies. I don't watch them as much anymore because my family's not into them, but Nightmare Before Christmas, Corpse Bride, Frank and Weenie, Monster House, Halloween Town, of course Hocus Pocus. All of these are great movies that we like to watch during the season and really get us into the Halloween mood.

There was a new movie that came out that people were really excited about and one I was actually pretty excited about because I was a huge fan of the first one, right? Hocus Pocus is a campy, terrible movie, not like ever going to win an Oscar for anything like that. But it is my childhood, right? Hocus Pocus came out in what, 93? I was like five, six, seven years old right when I was getting into Halloween. And I loved that movie. Hocus Pocus was my jam.

still is my jam, probably one of my favorite Halloween movies. they came out with Hocus Pocus 2 last year, either last year or the year before. Fuck, I can't even remember now. I'm getting old and my memory's going. But they came out with Hocus Pocus 2, and we were all hoping for this great throwback movie that would kind of go in its own direction, but also have throwbacks to the original movie. And it was a fucking dumpster fire.

hated that movie so much. can't tell you how much I despise that movie. There's a lot of reasons why I didn't like it. And I might sound like an old man telling you to get off my lawn. But I'm just going to go through a couple of the main reasons why that was just absolute dog shit.

The first one I could somewhat get over, although I still don't know why they went into this. And there's many things, but there's just a couple I'm going to touch upon. But the one was just like in the middle of the movie, the Sanderson sisters are walking through Salem trying to figure out, know, trying to find the book and the main heroes of the movie. And they walk into a Sanderson sisters costume competition.

But it's not just any competition. It is a drag show competition where essentially got a bunch of, I don't know what the appropriate term would be, whether it's drag queens or transsexual or whatever. I don't know what the term is. I'm not trying to offend anyone here. But essentially it was a drag show Sanderson sister competition. That's fine. I don't really give a shit.

That doesn't really like bother me. But I also don't understand why you need to throw that into a movie that's predominantly directed towards children and apparently millennial dads and moms as well, but towards children. Like, how am I supposed to explain to my kid that's five years old or six years old watching the movie why all of the Sanderson sisters are obese bearded men? I don't fucking know how I'm supposed to explain that to them. So

It was just kind of like a random thing that's thrown in there. It's not like a huge plot point and it's something that I can somewhat get over, but it just kind of like, why? Why'd you throw that in there? No clue. The thing that really gets me though, and this is where you lost me completely, is that at the end of the movie, there's just this huge turn where they try to make like being a witch like this.

like a good thing and like the main characters like, we could be witches. We could be our own coven. Let's take this book and like make things right. The book is wrapped in human skin from the first, from the first movie. The lore is that this book is wrapped in the skin of human beings and was basically like a covenant between the Sanderson sisters and the devil, right? Like basically a book that directly ties to, the devil. And I'm not coming at you. I'm not sitting here trying to

pray the devil out of you. I'm not coming from like a prudish Christian perspective. I'm just saying that's the idea that they had. And then all of a sudden it's like, well, we can be witches, we can be good, and we can do good things with this book that's wrapped in human fucking skin.

That just doesn't make any sense to me. That's like a terrible plot point. And like, there's so many holes in that completely. And then at the end of the movie, spoiler alerts, I should have said that at the beginning, spoiler alerts. If you haven't seen the movie and you want to see it, then don't listen to the rest of this.

At the end of the movie after Winifred, who's the main witch for the Sanderson sisters, you know, she loses her two sisters and then all of a sudden she has this change of heart. She's just been chasing power the entire time. Wants to be powerful, wants to be young. And then she achieves that, but she loses her two sisters along the way and she has a complete change of heart. She's just like, no, like

this would be nothing without my sisters. can't do this. I love them. I'm sorry. big apology and let's the heroes win. And I can't even remember what the fuck happens, but like she basically give up, gives up because of love for her sisters who she treats like shit the entire time. And it's just like such a twist from like her, character development, her character arc. she's just like,

going on this upward trajectory of being more and more evil and more power hungry. And then all of a sudden it's like, no, nevermind. I'm good. I'm, I'm loving. I love my sisters. I can give up everything I've been going for. I don't buy it. It's horse shit. It's a bad movie. I'm to go ahead and end, end that rant there. I do not suggest you go and watch Hocus Pocus to highly suggest Hocus Pocus one. Not, not a fan of Hocus Pocus too.

and then Hocus Pocus 3 apparently is in the works. Hopefully they fixed the wrongs from the previous one. We'll see.

But yeah, that's my rant of Hocus Pocus 2. That's my overview of Halloween, what we've got going on. Like I said, sorry this wasn't the most well thought out episode and that I just kind of ranted for a long time. I hope that you enjoyed it, but I'm gonna go ahead and wrap up this episode and next episode will hopefully be a little bit more thought out. I'll have a little bit more time to get it recorded, to get it planned out. But yeah, as always,

I hope that you all enjoyed it and have a happy, safe Halloween with your family. Have a good one.