A Curmudgeon Looks at Halloween

[lisa_goldstein]

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.

Comments

[movingfinger]

100% agree. Halloween was the night we were allowed to run around long after dark, breathless with self-generated terror, apprehensive of the trees and bushes that were perfectly well known to us. Would the flashlight batteries hold? Would someone toilet-paper a rhododendron? Would older boys jump out and yell or just grab someone's arm from behind, unseen? And what about the ghost stories?

All this was not bad. And I say that as someone who generally had to wear long johns under the costumes, because it was usually that cold at Halloween.

I heartily hate the commercial-district co-opting of Halloween. In the city, when I first moved there, even on a quiet street I ran through bags of candy between six and nine p.m. on October 31, every year. Then the local shopping district started offering treats during the day and parents began escorting their children right up to the counters. One of the other things about Halloween was that you had to talk to strangers. You had to say Please and Thank you, and when someone admired your costume you had to thank them for that too or possibly explain what it was. But it was good practice, and I don't know why the fearful late Boomer and Gen X parents have worked so hard to kill it.

[lisa_goldstein]

Yes, this is exactly what I wanted to say.

[philrm]

...she served her purpose, which was to stop people giving out healthy food and get back to candy.
So. Much. This. as the kids say these days.

When we first moved into our house (21 years ago), we'd get dozens of trick-or-treaters. Last year, we had exactly two, and two again last night. (One of them was a kid in an ostrich costume, which was awesome - the head must have topped out at well over six feet!) I even see kids go by on the street but not stop at our house, which makes me think that they're only stopping at the houses of people they know. The whole spirit of it just seems to have been lost.

[lisa_goldstein]

We got about eight groups of kids, ranging in size from one kid to about six, so altogether maybe 25 or 30 kids. Which seems like a lot, but nothing like what we used to get, and we had so much candy left over that my husband had to take it to work.

[sergebroom]

People are afraid. There always were bad people around, but nobody talked about it because, if you didn't talk about it, then you weren't helping making it happen. Like speaking of the Devil meaning he'd show up.

As for ourselves, we stopped setting up the lights a couple of years ago because, when kids did show up, we'd have our three dogs all start barking their heads off.

[lisa_goldstein]

Our one dog barked her head off all night, even after we put her in the crate. I do think some kids just were too afraid to try our house. A lot of them said, "Wow, that's a big dog."