As October draws to a close, Halloween looms on the horizon. That’s the holiday where kids dress up and go door to door for candy each year. That’s what all the kids do, right? It’s how we’re supposed to celebrate.

My daughter did it when she was little. She’d get all dressed up as Doc McStuffins or some other character from TV and then spend the evening wandering the streets with friends to get her piece of the tooth-rotting pie. Tricks. Treats. Great Pumpkin. You know the drill.

When my son Lucas came along, we did the same thing. Sooner, rather than later, it became clear that he wasn’t really a fan of what “all the kids” do.

Don’t get me wrong, Lucas loves candy and snacks. He also never had much of an issue with costumes, outside of masks, and looked adorable clad as Cookie Monster or a Ghostbuster as we’d bring his sister and a thousand of her friends through the neighborhood.Treats and cosplay were never the issue.

It was the actual trick-or-treating that was a massive hurdle. Trying to get him to approach a house was like trying to throw him into a volcano. For some reason, he was having none of it and he reacted very strongly to show his unhappiness.

We knew by his second Halloween that he was emerging as non-verbal so asking him “why” he did that or explaining the intricacies of the holiday didn’t help. We had no idea why he was laying on the ground just a few feet into our trek through the neighborhood. It was simply added to the list of questions that his pediatrician could shrug and tell us that “anything is possible.” Thanks, Doc.

Things lightened up when we broke out the wagon for Halloween. I wheeled my boy down the block as his sister would lovingly come running back from her door-knocks with fresh candy for him to eat. Lucas was happy to sit for a ride, feast on treats, and appease us until it was time to go home.

The yearly treat-tricking was more for my daughter than him anyway and, although he loved candy, it wasn’t something he openly cared about. Still, he endured the annual wagon ride with an indifference that, to be honest, I truly appreciated. He was doing this for us. That means a lot and, for kids on the spectrum, that often gets lost in the shuffle. We focus so much on the difficulties and things they won’t do that we overlook the times that they go along with things that we want to do.

I too struggled to recognize that in the early years. I wanted him to love trick or treating just as I did as a kid. He didn’t and that made me feel like I was somehow failing him.

As a father, you want to “make” your kids do things that you are convinced are fun. Like a parent throwing their child into the deep end of the pool or insisting they attend a social function, the idea is that if only I could get him to the door and show him that candy was waiting, he would love the concept. Just knock and eat. Who doesn’t love that?

Lucas. Lucas doesn’t love that.

I managed to get him to do it on a few occasions and it never went well. Just a few feet from free Twix bars, he’d be doing snow angels on a stranger’s front lawn while dressed like Elvis. Epic fail, Dad.

As the years went on and he outgrew the wagon, my son’s Halloween events became less about his sister’s plans. I would bring him to the initial meetup and wedge him into the group picture, which was important to me and accepted by him. As time passed, that became the only part he wanted to take part in.

This might fly in the face of those who think that a teal pumpkin will solve all our problems. Kids like mine don’t subscribe to all the fun that other children his age might enjoy. Making him participate year after year is counterproductive and, frankly, cruel.

There’s no worse feeling than force-feeding your idea of fun to a kid who despises it. I felt frustration as I pushed for him to do what the other kids do, but that all changed when I realized that my goal at holidays was never to make him do what the other kids do.

Whether a birthday, Christmas, or Arbor Day, the point of special days was to make him happy. It was to give him a fun day. If these typical holiday-centric activities weren’t fun for him, why push him to miserably comply? Sure, you try a few times to make sure he really doesn’t want to, but when you know, you know. Besides, there are plenty of fun things he enjoys that we can do instead.

It takes a while for parents to realize that and even a longer just to be okay with that. For many, it’s a process that forces us to let go of the life we envisioned for our child and embrace the life that will make them happy.

Today, Lucas goes to pumpkin patches or for photo opportunities with scary decorations. He eats candy and dresses up. Most of all, he’s happy. We both are.

My son doesn’t celebrate Halloween the way other kids like to. He celebrates it the way he likes to. It’s just one of many events, activities, and holidays that follow the same line of thinking in our home.

After all, you don’t bring your children trick or treating because they have to do it. You bring them because they like to do it. If they don’t like it, you figure out what they do like and do that instead. That goes for any child and any holiday.

Since we started viewing things that way, we’ve all been much happier. The trick is to make the day a treat for everyone, especially those who march to their own beat. My son is one of those people and we’re proud to march right alongside of him.