2006 10 Halloween

Halloween

When I was a boy, the Halloween costumes were mostly home made. We were robots, space ships, princes and princesses. Our costumes were made of dreams about a wonderful time and dreams about the excitement of being something you were not. It was always a disappointment if the costume you worked hard on didn’t look quite as shiny or realistic as your peer’s costume. It was also a disappointment to discover that the dream you dreamt was just that—a dream—and not the reality you wanted it to be. Surely even now, in spite of the lost creativity of bygone times, children’s dreams are realized through store-bought realistic costumes.

One object of Halloween is to obtain the maximum amount of candy one can in the limited geography and time allowed by your parents. That has not changed through the years. Fortunately, the words “Trick or Treat” have mostly lost the “trick” connotation. It’s all about the treats. What an amazing tradition we have in sending our children out into the night…sometimes raining or in some climates even snowing…to gather junk food. Without doing much research into the matter, I suppose that the timing of Halloween had to do with the bounty of the harvest and the sharing of that bounty. The Halloween tradition contains some lessons in life which bear telling.

Door to door solicitation is the first lesson. When you ask someone for something they often will give it to you. If you don’t ask, you don’t get. However, Halloween gives a false sense of how easy that job is. What is the barter? Trick or treat gets kids candy, but what do the adult givers get in return? For my mother, it was the satisfaction of interaction with the children. Instead of candy, she would cook up popcorn and put it in bags and invite the children in for a cup of warm apple cider. She’d have a chance to ask them about their costumes and generally pay attention to them more than just a “Hello-goodbye-thank you very” much exchange. It was a good way to get to know the neighborhood children a bet better. The parents would sometimes come it too to be sure that my mother was not a pedophile, but also to get to know their neighbor.

Manners is another lesson learned. Sometimes parents will be at the sidewalk reminding the children to say “Thank you.” We even had one little child say, “Tricker treat, please.”

Today news organizations like to sensationalize weird people who put bad things in candy, since it makes shocking good news and sells advertisements benefiting the news organization. So every child who goes trick or treat has the fear that whatever might be in home cooked popcorn could be dangerous. Parents warn, “Only take wrapped candy. Know who you’re dealing with. When you get home, I’ll go through the bag with you.”

One Halloween, when I was about sixteen, I decided to rig up a speaker system under the steps leading up to our home. There was a screen vent into the basement out of which I could see the approaching trick-or-treaters. As they would walk up the path, I would make scary sounds. “Hoo-aaagh. Heeee-heee. I’m going to get you.” I added a visual effect to the sounds by connecting a light in a carved pumpkin to a model train rheostat. This arrangement made a fun impression on the younger children and was a nice diversion for me…being much too old to go trick-or-treating.

The age of trick-or-treaters is another item to consider about Halloween. When is too old? At our house, we sometimes get some high school students with huge bags of booty and very deep voices. Some of them don’t even bother to wear costumes. That is truly scary since some of them actually could engage in the trick part of our national celebration. I have seen pumpkins tossed in the street and scattered by vehicle tracks. And these “young people” sometimes arrive driving vehicles. Their idea is to frequent the more affluent neighborhoods for the concentration of loot and the generosity of wealthy homeowners. When that starts to happen, the signal is to turn off all the lights in the house including the porch light and call it enough for the night. There were a few lean years when we simply didn’t think we could afford to treat whole neighborhoods to bags full of candy. In those times, we’d sometimes leave the light out and go in the back room to carve a pumpkin for our own enjoyment.

Pumpkin carving brings to mind some fond memories. Mother would always insist that we carve the pumpkins on newspaper to avoid making a mess on the table. Scooping out the seeds was nasty business, since they are so slimy. It was fun to draw shapes on the pumpkin and try to cut a toothless smile, scowl or a particularly scary frown. Several years when Roberta and I were newlyweds, we carved both the front and the back of the same pumpkin. I enjoyed making double exposures on film so that it appeared that there were two pumpkins side by side. Later we enjoyed carving the pumpkins with our children and sharing in their fun of Halloween.

There is a commercial aspect to Halloween which benefits not only our candy gathering youth, but also the community. For-profit and non-profit businesses alike benefit from this tradition. Trick or treat for UNICEF is fairly common. I’ve recently seen other charities piggybacking on that idea. Businesses sell candy, decorations, pumpkins and costumes. Those businesses are taxed which helps pave roads, fund education and so forth.

Now if you really want to think of something scary, think of the fact that we elect our politicians just a few days after Halloween. They’re busy slamming each other with dirt in order to gain the attention of an ever diminishing supply of voters in contested races who have lost faith in the electoral process. Just imagine what elections we’d have if we had the same number of voters as trick-or-treaters. After all, they want the same thing…something for nothing!


©Frank Bliss 2006 All rights reserved
October, 2006