Reading Can Quiet the Spooks on Halloween

Tonight on Main Street in Ventura there will be a Halloween party--where both the cause and the cure for kids’ holiday-induced crazies will be in bountiful supply.

The principal cause, of course, is candy, which even the strictest parent dare not proscribe on Halloween.

The cure may be bit of a surprise. According to Diane Nevew, owner of the Book Mall of Ventura, the sure-fire antidote to a sugar high is a scary story: packaged in book form, suitable for reading aloud as a calmative, use-tested by the American Academy of Pediatrics and savvy parents nationwide.

And this simple solution is available at Calico Cat, Second Time Around, Phantom Books, Ventura Bookstore and the Book Mall--all open after dark on Main Street tonight. Also open will be Adventures for Kids on Telegraph Road plus Ventura County Library branches in Camarillo, Oak Park, Ojai and Simi Valley.

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Bring the kids around at the end of trick-or-treating, these book wranglers recommend, and take home something for reading aloud at bedtime.

According to Jody Fickes Shapiro, owner of Adventures for Kids, “Bedtime is a scary time for kids--and there’s this extra element of scariness at Halloween.” Nevertheless, she’s found that a carefully selected tale of howls and clanking chains will lull a kid as old as 6 or 8 to sleep tonight.

Maybe, at bedtime tonight, of all nights, hearing anything more about yawning graves will evoke, well, a yawn.

If you’re reading this column at breakfast today and can get to a TV set by 7:30 a.m.--or catch a repeat at 11 a.m.--watch or videotape the season premiere of PBS’ daily series, “Storytime.” Today’s episode, “Scared Silly,” provides some good examples of how to have fun reading to your kids. Actor John Astin (“The Frighteners,” “The Addams Family”) will read from “The House That Drac Built” by Judy Sierra.

Parents who watch the show any morning will learn something about the emerging concept of “family literacy.” The show’s Glendale-based producer Patricia Kunkel sounds like a cook who actually eats what she makes when she says, “I’ve become a much better reader-a-louder by watching the show.”

Kunkel points out that, “One of the most important things you can do to help your kids succeed is to read to them.” PBS research, she reports, indicates that the 3- to 7-year-olds who watch the show “are more likely to reach out for that second or third book when you read to them--and want to visit a library or bookstore.”

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The American Academy of Pediatrics has recently endorsed the position that, if you are a parent, “the most important 20 minutes of your day can be the time you spend reading to your child.”

When it comes to the Halloween-specific problem of peeling kids off the ceiling after one too many Tootsie Rolls, Jody Fickes Shapiro has some tricks of her own, though not related to her profession as a bookseller.

When her kids were younger, she greeted the returning trick-or-treaters with a sly smile. On the table where the kids would sort out their haul were new toys. “I would sit there playing with some Tonka trucks, a Brio set or some Transformers,” she recalls. When they asked her to let them play with the new toys, she would sell or trade them for the candy.

This only worked until they were about 8, she says. But it sure made it easier to read them a Halloween bedtime story.

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DETAILS

* HAUNTING TIME: The 400 block of Main Street in Ventura will be closed off to traffic from 5:30-9 tonight for “Happy Haunting” and safe trick-or-treating. Also, open on this stretch of Main Street are bookstores such as Calico Cat, Phantom Books, Ventura Bookstore and the Book Mall of Ventura, where lots of scary tales are available. The County Library’s Camarillo, Oak Park, Ojai and Simi Valley branches will be open until 8 p.m. And Adventures for Kids, a bookstore at 3457 Telegraph Road, will be open until 7:30 p.m.