When I was a kid, Cabbage Night was considered a holiday. My friends and I mostly spent the night hanging out on the local streets, spraying each other with shaving cream. The only damage was to our clothes. My parents cut me a lot of slack with this as long as I did not roam too far and came home at a decent time. P.S. Glad to hear that others call it as Cabbage Night as well. Coming from Northern NJ, I thought I was the only down here who called it that.

Egging someone's house or car is not a benign act!

After we testified against a so-called friend of our son's who broke into the homes of his "friends" and took stuff we were the recipients of an egging. It's not a harmless teenaged prank.

I'm a lot more willing to tolerate personal risk-taking than acts that harm others - even their stuff.

I think this is the kind of thing that an admonition the night-of isn't too effective at stopping. You lay the groundwork in the YEARs ahead by stressing respectful behavior towards others, monitoring friends and activities - and the night 'of' coming down on the "where are you going and with who."

I can only hope that the kid who served some time for theft in his teens has straightened out and moved on to better things. May his life be as hopeful as our newly painted house.

We did TPing in MS and HS (not just on Halloween), people who egged houses and cars were thought of as jerks. I had a number of friends that had ruined paint jobs on their cars, making them look even worse than the POS they were.

Why is it called cabbage night? I don't see any destruction, the day after Halloween anymore. Older kids don't seem interested and little kids are trick or treating.

Never heard of "cabbage night" or anything like it. Is this a regional thing?

Also, agree with pp that egging someone's house or car it NOT a benign act.

Cheecky, we must live in the same neighborhood or sumptin. If my jack-o-lantern hasn't been smashed in the street by Thanksgiving, I have to go out and do the deed myself. Heck, when I was a teenager, by the next Sunday after halloween, every jack-o-lantern on the street would have at least its face kicked in. (That's just sooooo fun to do!) But what's wrong with teenagers nowadays that they are no longer motivated to perform their public service duty to smash left over pumpkins in the streets? You know, so us adults, in turn, can get their kicks by running the squash pile over with their car tires on the way to church.

I don't condone the destruction of property. Stupid is not an excuse. Whacky, while smashing the pumpkins might be fun for the teens, its not cool when an 8 year old spent an afternoon working on his super cool pumpkin with his dad only to have it destroyed for the fun of some teen. If kids MUST do this kind of stuff, then they should keep it amongst themselves. Kids live up or down to your expectations. I suppose if you expect your boy to do dumb things, he will. The term cabbage night is new to me and I'm from the midwest.

Seeing smashed pumpkins has always bothered me. No one has a right to destroy ANYTHING that belongs to someone else. Plus then some kids start smashing pumpkins and continue with mail boxes. Growing up I had an Uncle with severe diabetes who lived on a busy street and every year around Halloween someone would smash his mailbox in. Maybe not a big deal to some people but for him it was a major issue to have to buy a new mailbox and have someone help him install it.

I grew up near a town that has a serious pumpkin smashing tradition. The town has a big hill in the middle and every year teenagers spread the word that the annual "pumpkin roll" will take place on a particular night. It's not always Halloween - it could be sometime before or even much later. Late in the evening, hundreds of stolen pumpkins are rolled down the hill to smash at the bottom and make a giant mess. This has been going on since the 60's - everyone knows it's going to happen but the police still give people tickets for littering if they catch you. It's like a rite of passage.

There is a difference between acts of destruction and the belief that you are invincible as a teenager.

One is wrong no matter what age you are, and the consequences should be appropriate, REGARDLESS of your own past. The other, well, you hope you have raised your kids to be a bit smarter than you were. (I as well!)

OT to AB and Laura (it was you, Laura, right?) - re: Columbia.

I should find out today if the company wants to go forward (i.e., fly me up there for an interview).
We'll see...
As for what we'd be looking for - good schools - we're more into an 'urban' lifestyle (if there is anything really 'urban' in Atlanta...:). Walking places, mass transit. Definitely DO NOT like places with covenants and 'planned communities.'

We'll see...it may be premature. Also looking at North of NYC and Chicago. And staying here. Nothing much has come of this job search for me or the DH - but we're still hoping, given how unhappy he is.

But smashing somebody else's rotting jack-o-latern after Halloween in the street isn't really vandalism, it's more on the lines of helping a neighbor take out their trash.

Besides, you can bet dad will get a kick out of aligning his back tire just behind the smashed pumpkin and stomping on the accelerator as he looks out his rear-view mirror to see how far the pulp spews.

It's a guy thing.

In upstate NY, we called it mischief night, and we didn't egg or TP anyone, we'd raid the gardens of our friends and neighbors - taking anything left (tomatoes, cucumbers, berries, yes, even cabbage), and chucking the rotting produce at trees, streets signs, etc, to see who could make the biggest mess. I haven't seen any signs of this kind of thing around my neighborhood. Tonight the elementary and middle schools both have dances, so I know where my kids will be tonight.

OT to atlmom -- good luck! Keep us posted. If you get a little closer, I'm sure AB and I will have some more concrete ideas. In general, Columbia is more about planned communities than urban-style living -- i.e., not a lot of mass transit (though there are some express buses to Baltimore, and the MARC trains to DC and Balt. aren't that far away), but a fair number of walking and biking trails connecting neighborhoods. Honestly, it wasn't really my thing; I'm more into older homes, more of a grid street pattern vs. cul-de-sacs, and a "main street" kind of thing. But there are a ton of different neighborhoods there, all developed over different times, and with different price ranges and housing styles and such, so you kind of have to look at each neighborhood individually.

Or you can move @ 5 miles north and be my neighbor in Catonsville. :-)

@Dadat39: I was in Massachusetts, so I don't know how regional the naming is. "Devil's Night" really came to notoriety 15 or so years ago in Detroit, when the issues went waaaaay beyond TPing.

@moxiemom: I think the reality is that *most* Cabbage Nighters don't actually cause property damage (yes, eggs leave lasting damage to cars, etc.). It's just as excuse to *talk* about all of the wild stuff you *might* do.

When I was a kid, dad took us trick-or-treating. I remember one house would give candy to the kids and beers to the parents.

Let's see, ruining a paint job, damaging other people's stuff,causing a lot of work for others, leaving a parent to explain to a small child why someone would want to destroy their pumpkin that they worked so hard on. NONE! no slack and maybe you ought to reexamine your self and your values.........

Never heard of Cabbage Night or by any other name--but sure, I knew of kids who got into mischief. In answer to Brian's question, I have one of my own. Do you think your parents had spotless personal histories as kids themselves? How much slack did they cut you? That might be a good starting place for your question of how much slack to cut your own kids. Another starting thought: What do you consider to be okay things to do? What, now as an adult, in retrospect, of the things you did or knew were being done, do you think are not great activities for kids to be doing (e.g., now you know how bad egging really is).

"When I was a kid, dad took us trick-or-treating. I remember one house would give candy to the kids and beers to the parents."

This is like my current neighborhood, we have a lot of fun.

Moxie, I think Wacky is pulling everyone's chain to the extent that smashing pumpkins (not the group) used to be very mainstream. We usually had ours clobbered Halloween night and it was no big deal, but things are different now. My kids put a lot of effort into their pumpkins too and if it was smashed I would tell them it's not right to destroy someone's property, but that it is just a pumpkin that is going to rot anyways.

Laura: well, it also depends on where we can find a ssynagogue, etc. Sometimes it's easy, sometimes it's not...:)It looked like there were several in and very near columbia. well, i'm supposed to hear today if they want to move forward, just thought I'd get some input. maybe it's a moot point...

Yep -- you're right, there are a number of synagogues in Howard County, and can give you some more specific guidance on that if you get to that point. We're sort of betwixt and between on that, with everything N or S of us. There's also a great summer camp up NW of the city, and it runs bus service from a bunch of locations in HoCo.

Even though we live in Balt. Co. (because of the town aspects I mentioned above), I still commute to HoCo for a bunch of stuff (synagogue, daycare, summer camp buses, mall, etc). It's all really close and pretty convenient and livable.

Hey, how do you fix a sick pumpkin?

Put a pumpkin patch on it!

atlmom, if ya want "urban", HoCo ain't it. :-)

Yes, there are a number of synagogues - the "planned community" has always had a fair number of Jewish residents and HoCo public schools still get Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur off.

Depending on where you'll be working (closer to Baltimore, closer to DC, or right in Columbia itself) you might want to go with Catonsville/Ellicott City (closer to Baltimore) or somewhere in northern Montgomery County (closer to DC). Yes, there are express buses from HoCo to the Baltimore and DC Metro lines, and there's a MARC station in Dorsey for train commuters, but it's not like walking to a Metro stop.

I was just talking to people I grew up with about how we thought our town - Teaneck - was the only town that called it cabbage night.

It was "cabbage night" next door in Leonia, too!