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Oct. 30th, 2017 04:31 pm
A Curmudgeon Looks at Halloween
There was a Halloween parade in our neighborhood over the weekend, and we went to look at the costumes. We passed ninjas and Captain Americas and witches and pumpkins, all of them going up and down the street and stopping at stores that gave out candy. Even some of the parents dressed up.
It was all very cute, but it still seemed wrong to me. Maybe I’m getting curmudgeonly in my old age, but when I was a kid Halloween meant spookiness, danger. It didn’t take place on a bright sunny day, and we didn’t go to stores but people’s houses, none of them marked to show which ones wanted to take part. And I may be misremembering but I’m pretty sure that we went by ourselves, without parents, after we passed a certain age, though I don’t remember what that age was.
So we met strange costumed figures in the dark, some of them truly scary. We were told by kids in masks, indistinct in the darkness, not to go to certain houses — and sometimes the reason was obvious (the house was falling apart, the owner barely keeping it together) and sometimes not, and sometimes, our hearts pounding, we went to one of those houses anyway.
And really, very, very few kids have run into trouble on Halloween night. That old lady putting razor blades in apples turns out to be an urban myth — though in my opinion she served her purpose, which was to stop people giving out healthy food and get back to candy. Another tradition of Halloween night is to dump your bag out when you get home and then work toward the biggest sugar rush of the year.
We get fewer and fewer kids at our house each Halloween. We’ve already stopped getting the kids in our street, who probably go to the parade, but even the kids I used to see from other neighborhoods don’t come any more. I think a tradition is ending as people become more and more afraid. I hope not, though.
It was all very cute, but it still seemed wrong to me. Maybe I’m getting curmudgeonly in my old age, but when I was a kid Halloween meant spookiness, danger. It didn’t take place on a bright sunny day, and we didn’t go to stores but people’s houses, none of them marked to show which ones wanted to take part. And I may be misremembering but I’m pretty sure that we went by ourselves, without parents, after we passed a certain age, though I don’t remember what that age was.
So we met strange costumed figures in the dark, some of them truly scary. We were told by kids in masks, indistinct in the darkness, not to go to certain houses — and sometimes the reason was obvious (the house was falling apart, the owner barely keeping it together) and sometimes not, and sometimes, our hearts pounding, we went to one of those houses anyway.
And really, very, very few kids have run into trouble on Halloween night. That old lady putting razor blades in apples turns out to be an urban myth — though in my opinion she served her purpose, which was to stop people giving out healthy food and get back to candy. Another tradition of Halloween night is to dump your bag out when you get home and then work toward the biggest sugar rush of the year.
We get fewer and fewer kids at our house each Halloween. We’ve already stopped getting the kids in our street, who probably go to the parade, but even the kids I used to see from other neighborhoods don’t come any more. I think a tradition is ending as people become more and more afraid. I hope not, though.