What caused Halloween to become a fall holiday on par with Thanksgiving and Christmas? When did the memo go out? A hundred years ago, when I was a young tike growing up in South Jersey, you wore a thin vacuformed polystyrene spaceman mask that attached to your head with an elastic band, and wore your regular clothes under what seemed like a gray Hefty bag with a NASA logo that tied in the back like a hospital gown, which your parents bought for you at the local Woolworth’s for $4.99 or so. You scored a few tiny Hershey or Three Musketeers bars, and your parents worried about you getting an apple with a razor blade or a shot of LSD inside. You watched It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown every year on Channel 10, along with John Facenda’s TV reports about Camden going up in flames annually during the previous night, and worried that the mayhem wasn’t going to spread to your neighborhood. (This New York Times article on Camden and Mischief Night found at the top of a Google search on the topic was published in 1992, but could have ran verbatim for every year prior for a quarter of a century or so.)
And once the candy was gone later that night or the next day, that was about it. Today though, Halloween is a major industry, and plenty of families put as much work into decorating the house for Halloween as they do for Christmas. One of my neighbors has a giant pirate ship in their front lawn for Halloween; others have turned their front lawns into haunted houses and grave yards, with plenty of cobwebs, skeletons, and come the witching hour, lots of smokey dry ice. But not everybody is happy with the rapid growth of the holiday. Or as Mollie Hemingway writes at Ricochet, “Could We Tone Down the Halloween Mania a Smidge?”
My last neighborhood (Capitol Hill, DC) had such dramatic Halloween celebrations that people came in from miles around. One neighbor used to recreate scary movies or videos (e.g. Friday the 13th, Michael Jackson’s Thriller) with actual actors and dancers.
Truth be told, I’m not a huge fan of Halloween. But neither do I forbid my children from taking part. The older one will be a cheeseburger this year, the younger an Octopus. I do forbid any dressing up as anything scary or demonic, but just can’t bring myself to ban a holiday where people give my kids candy and tell them how cute they are.
But I did pause after reading this column from Amity Shlaes, headlined “Halloween’s Pagan Themes Fill West’s Faith Vacuum.” She notes that consumers are expected to spend $6.86 billion on Halloween this fall. Here’s how her piece concludes:
There’s a reason for the pull of the pagan. In the U.S., we’ve been vigorously scrubbing our schools and other public spaces of traces of monotheistic religion for many decades now. Such scrubbing leaves a vacuum. The great self-deception of modern life is that nothing will be pulled into that vacuum. Half a century ago, the psychologist Carl Jung noted the heightened interest in UFOs, and concluded that the paranormal was “modern myth,” a replacement for religion.
Children or adults who today relish every detail of zombie culture or know every bit of wizarding minutiae are seeking something to believe in. That church, mosque and synagogue are so controversial that everyone prefers the paranormal as neutral ground is disconcerting. There’s something unsettling about the education of a child who comfortably enumerates the rules for surviving zombie apocalypse but finds it uncomfortable to enumerate the rules of his grandparents’ faith, if he knows them.
Perhaps when walking down your street this Oct. 31, you’ll see a child in an Aslan costume, or one dressed as Caspian, C.S. Lewis’s prince. The “Narnia” series was Lewis’s premeditated effort to lure kids to Jesus Christ through myth. The manipulative Lewis was on to something: Parents can keep children away from religion, but they can’t stop children from believing in something.
Fans of the orange holiday may want to pause for a moment to look at the empty spaces between its rituals, as with the pumpkin’s smile. Some of us forgo it to dedicate ourselves to one faith or another. But you don’t have to reject Halloween to ask what it may be replacing.
Exactly. It’s worth at least being intentional in how we celebrate this holiday and it’s worth thinking about what we say by how we celebrate it.
So what are your thoughts on Halloween? Do you make a big deal about it? If so, why? What will you — and/or your kids — be trick or treating as?
Me? I’ll probably go out as Mick Jagger. Or at least his CPA.
I LOVE Halloween. The costumes, the haunted houses and corn mazes, The way the woods themselves try to get in on the act, and of course the horror flicks that run 24/7 during the month.
The author (one of them) mentions rules for surviving a zombie apocolypse and acts so very scandalized that groups of people talk sbout it but honestly she just comes across as tenderfooted.
As for my costume me and about 20 friends are all going as zombies.
Beware the horde fellas.
I think that you illustrate the authors point, perfectly!
Explain?
I believe that Hallowe’en fills a necessary place in our culture but, like so many other trends, it no longer knows what that place is. I think of Hallowe’en as a sort of carnival in the original sense–a farewell. Hallowe’en should be a release valve, which we use to vent all that is dark and scary in ourselves. Then, November 1, we can dust off the cobwebs and march forward into Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hannukkah and all the celebrations of light.
That is how my parents did it. On All Saints Day the skeletons and pumpkins came down, the bats and witches were packed off to the attic and we began thinking about Thanksgiving. All that remained were the few pieces of unpopular candy at the bottom of my sack and my face was turned away from darkness.
Can’t pick and choose. If you object to the pagan origins of Hallowe’en, you also have to object to the pagan origins of Easter and Christmas, as well.
Or, just have fun and enjoy them as secular celebrations, which is what they’ve become. Me, I LOVE the holidays, especially Hallowe’en and Christmas =^[.]^=
And it’s important to remember that for a long time Christmas was a minor holiday. Heck, for the first 75 years (IIRC) of the US, Congress sat in session on Dec. 25th. And Halloween was the Catholic Church’s attempt to Christianize a pagan holiday. You start out with Samhain, have All Saints Day Nov. 2, All Hallowed Peoples Day Nov. 1, and All Hallows eve Oct. 31. So in a Roman Catholic sense, it’s a Christian holy day.
Zombie Apocalypse is really just a fun way of learning survival & disaster preparedness skills.
I think people of my generation (I’m 47) enjoyed Halloween as kids, then when we went to college, continued to celebrate as an excuse to have big parties (with substances stronger than alcohol) and after graduation continued to use it as an excuse for a party. Some folks just got more elaborate over the years. Personally, I enjoy being in the role of candy giver these days.
“zombie apocalypse survival tips”. cdc tax dollars being used for private gain. time to connect the dots. guarantee determining the six degrees of separation between private and federal starts with the simple act of googling “zombie apocalypse filmed in atlanta” (without the quotes).
Wouldn’t want to discriminate now would we?
Let me see, I must by all the bags of oranges or no bags of oranges, just picking the bag I like is discrimination. Right!
@ChiefParker
It’s not about discrimination. If you object to one holiday due to pagan origins and you choose not to celebrate but then celebrate another holiday with pagan origins then that requires logical reasoning as to why you object to one and not the other.
I think that Holloween has become Christmas for Jews and nonreligious people. Being Jewish we never decorated for Christmas but saw many of our friends houses covered in lights and plastic Santas. Now that we are older, with houses of our own, many people feel free to decorate for Holloween. I recently moved to a predominately Jewish suburban neighborhood and have been amazed at the elaborate Holloween displays in October (any many Menorahs in December)
I hate to point this out, but a lot of Christian holidays are pagan holidays that were assimilated into the new faith by the Romans. Just sayin’.
Personally, I’m not a big Halloween celebrator, but I do not object to it, either. Like Christmas, it’s mostly for kids…and in today’s society, where we pressure kids to grow up quickly, I’m all for anything that let’s kids be kids and have fun doing it.
I find the religious objections to the holiday rather silly, and I have little patience for objections themselves or the people making them.
I Object!
Halloween is popular because it has become secular – it’s the one holiday that is hard to criticize as celebrating “oppression” (Thanksgiving) or “glorifying war” (July 4th), or “religious intolerance” (Christmas). It’s a modern invention that mostly involves kids getting candy. The only complaint aired is about candy and so far people are ignoring that.
It’s also a time where everyone can adopt a different persona: scary or sexy. Take the popularity of risque costumes for women: it’s a time where a woman can dress provocative without risk of judgement – in fact it’s embraced. People can embrace their fears or indulge in role play in a socially acceptable way.
True there is a dark side (like the author says), but much of it is only tangentially related. Like “Devil’s Night” in Detroit in the 80′s (again, Oct 30th, not the 31st).
Like Super Bowl Sunday, it’s the one secular holiday everyone in the US can feel free to celebrate.
Sure, we get to put on a certain persona just for kicks if we want to, but Hallowe’en is plastic and stereotyped. It does not give us any opportunity to express how we REALLY think and feel.
I’d like to be able to do something more like THIS.
Wow, Does the sun ever come out for you? That is a dark view of the world.
If I were you, I’d ask for a return on the money paid fore your education.
Whoops! I paid for that…
“The manipulative Lewis was on to something: Parents can keep children away from religion, but they can’t stop children from believing in something.”
When I was a kid, all the boys wanted to dress up like real people, like cowboys from a John Wayne movie (sheriff’s were big), or soldiers, or police officers. You had the odd vampire or a guy in a dress (that was always Mike M., and he alaways liked to sing Judy Garland and show tunes; enough said), but for the most part it was little boys trying to be tough guys they respected from the movies or from TV. Today you have wizards, monsters, LOTS of vampires, witches, some pirates, and the occassional guy in a dress (the next generation after Mike M., only today we’re supposed to celebrate his diversity, rather than laughing our butts off at them). In short, we went from boys wanting to be real, tough, men, to complete fantasy. Sort of like this country. Our dreams used to be based in reality. Not anymore. Today anything goes, from dressing like a wizard to dressing like Mary Tyler Moore (boy, am I dating myself). Reality has very little bearing on what kids want or expect these days.
So what am I going to do this Halloween? Probably watch a good John Wayne movie, like “The Searchers.” And if kids knock on the door, I’ll just hope that I see a few sheriff’s and nobody dressed like Mike M. God help us.
she lives in the wrong neighborhood. honestly.
you’re supposed to go clean up the family crypt and have a picnic with the dead. all- hallows, and all saints.
There’s whole giant cemeteries that look like a city in New Orleans. The Northeast has the giant cemeteries with the sculptures on top of the graves. Older churches had kirk-yards, with graves.
Just b/c the efficient imagination simply insists on flat pavingstones as gravemarkers in commercially sanitized lawns, our lush imagination has to plant a proper all soul’s graveyard on the suburban lawn.
As well, the sanitized and pink “religious” literature has a great deal to answer for. Zombies, in general, are seeking justice in death.
I’m procrastinating from making a costume, right now. A splendid costume, a dark haunting of the imagination of my sunshiney little boy. I’m surprised at what he wants- who knew? Shadows inside the sunshine….
This author must have been my neighbor, because the first paragraph describes our halloweens growing up exactly, down to the channel we watched and the fears generated by what was happening in Camden on Mischief Night, but would never actually happen in our little suburban enclaves! lol! The only thing I disagree on was that we really raked in the candy – since there were many neighborhoods nearby, the kids just grouped together and hit development after development together – and had weeks worth of candy when we were done! Things were different then though because once you hit about age 8 or 9, Mom and Dad didn’t follow you around – just let you go with your large group of friends and didn’t worry that you wouldn’t be coming back again because of predators, murderers and other real life scaries.
I am not a big fan of halloween though. Decorate my front porch a little, but that’s about it. I would have been fine if my kids did not want to trick or treat, but we always let them because despite our beliefs that it was not a holiday we wanted to “celebrate”, we felt it would be cruel to deny them the fun they saw other kids their ages having. We drew the line at “scary” or “demonic” costumes and they never had a problem with it. When they hit middle school age, 10, 11, 12, they started volunteering at alternative activities for halloween, by their own desire – fun festivals at churches, etc, prefering to give other kids safe alternatives to trick or treating on the streets and ones that stressed harvest and life’s blessings themes rather than the darker aspects of the halloween holiday.
But to each his own. I won’t tell you how to “celebrate” halloween, if you don’t tell me how to either. I think the Amity Shlaes column does make some really valid points about a “faith vacuum” needing to be filled though.
“You scored a few tiny Hershey or Three Musketeers bars …”
Seriously? My bag used to get so heavy I’d have to sling it over my shoulder, staggering down the sidewalk like a sailor on leave.
But I don’t see that Halloween has changed any more than the general culture has. Life was simpler when I was a kid. My folks lived paycheck to paycheck. Everything was black & white and low tech. There were fewer commercials on t.v. (and everywhere else). On football Sundays the announcers merely called the plays and we were allowed to listen to marching band music at half time. Can you imagine? No endless commercial breaks, no loud-mouthed sportsters telling us what to expect in next weeks game, or next season. We used to live in the Now more back then. We savored simple pleasures. Yeah, Halloween is more hyped up than before. But that has more to do with the fact that when we were kids, America still had a foot in the production economy. Today we live in a pure service/consumer economy. And Halloween has simply become a part of that.
But I still love Halloween because it makes me feel young. I still carve my pumpkin every year — always the same peg-toothed grinning face. My wife drags out the halloween decorations and we’ve got pumpkins and witches and bats and candles — dozens of candles — all over the place. I dig out my favorite horror flicks: The Omen, The Conqueror Worm, etc. I’m just an old Midwestern boy who loves Halloween for the same reason that I love the seasons of the year — most particularly the crisp, colorful, cool & apple-scented Fall.
We worry too damn much nowadays. I blame the liberals for that, in oh so many ways.
I see two things going on here. I definitely second the opinion that most major Christian holidays are based on pagan holidays, so I see that as an objection that doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. If you hate Halloween’s dark side, then emphasize the All Saints side instead. Having some sort of dark, scary, spirit day is fairly typical in most cultures; evil and death are facts of life, and I think that’s why most cultures like to have one day where they examine this reality and explore their reactions to it.
But coming at the problem from another angle, cultures change. It’s a natural thing. It has happened to many Western countries for centuries, and it hasn’t marked the end of civilization for any of them, no matter how much hyperventilating goes on. This is why we no longer wear corsets, powdered wigs, light candles on our Christmas trees, or other traditions our ancestors thought they couldn’t do without or that would supplant earlier traditions. You can’t freeze the world in one place and expect fashions, styles of music/painting/hair, observances of holidays or what have you to stay the same for millennium on end. You have to let the culture breath and change within certain healthy parameters and realize you’re not losing anything really. Sometimes we take things too darn seriously.
Children have always loved Halloween, and no wonder. Dressing up in a costume, going out after dark, collecting a big bag of candy. Great fun.
The question is why ADULTS have become so infatuated with it.
Not all of them. I did the best Halloween project ever when I was teaching Sunday school at an Episcopal cathedral. The kids wanted to do a horror house that Halloween, but I objected: All Hallows day was established to recognize the dead of the Roman persecution under Nero, in the course of which so many people were martyred that they couldn’t be identified for beatification. So All Saints day was founded to sanctify the nameless mass of Christians who died in those days.
Seeking to convey this while still having fun, I acted on a suggestion by my Canon to do catacombs (which, I suppose inevitably, became “catacoombs” to the kids). We built the catacombs out of lath and cardboard flats in the parish hall, then whitewashed the flats and covered the white walls with the graffiti of the time. I told the kids they could put anything up there they wanted to, as long as it appeared in the actual catacombs and the kids knew what it meant. We took the parents through it on Halloween, and, in the tradition of the original Roman Christians, held a little prayer service at the center. The kids explained the graffiti as we went along, and we had (of course) a dead body or two, which became the most desired role.
Halloween means something, and what it means can be conveyed to children in an enjoyable and educational way. It’s a damned (literally) shame that we’ve turned it into a celebration of Hell.
Incidentally, I’m now a fundamentalist, teaching Sunday school in a small biker church in Irving. I still think that was the best Halloween project ever.
I take it you didn’t bob for apples.
Serving food to the hungry kids would have been appropriate. I assume the Romans were familiar with apples, though I never heard of them bobbing for apples.
In the earliest days of Christianity, food was served before Divine Liturgy. The early Church soon changed that custom; the faithful were to fast before Liturgy, breaking the fast with the Eucharist, then having their communal meal afterward. As far as I know, Liturgy took place, and meals were eaten, in the catacombs, because it would have been too dangerous to congregate anywhere else.
Great story, Charlie!
I’m an ex-Anglican/Episcopalian too: in places, that church altogether embraces the pagan. E.g., What they do at St. John the Divine in NYC at Halloween is an abomination. Check out its Halloween Extravaganza and Procession of the Ghouls:
http://gonyc.about.com/od/halloween/ss/Halloween-Extravaganza-And-Procession-Of-The-Ghouls-At-St-John-The-Divine.htm
“The question is why ADULTS have become so infatuated with it.”
It’s an excuse to shed your boring day job persona in favor of something fun and/or goofy.
Life is too short to not have fun every once in a while and one night and/or month a year is not overdoing it.
How will I spend Halloween?
Why, scaring the living crap out of the neighborhood kids, followed by prandial gifts of sugary delights.
Several months of adolescent hyperactivity ensue.
Halloween is great. My wife, who’s into crafts, loves making the costumes and decorating. As somebody who’s afraid of the dark, I love the scares. I suppose it’s a way of desensitizing myself and attempting to overcome my own weakness, but, to me, Halloween (in fact the whole month of October) becomes a horror movie marathon. But the scares usually fall flat and my favorites are for reasons of good writing and film making, rather than scares, like Brainscan and Dracula. Games like Silent Hill and Alan Wake have been pretty scary, though, but the scare wears off after beating them.
This year I’m going to be the Vault Dweller, with blue jumpsuit trimmed with yellow and either a 13 or a 101 on my back…probably 101 for recognition factor. My wife is going to be Harpo Marx, I think. And my daughter is going to be Willy Wonka. (They both have curly hair that slightly resembles that of Harpo and Gene Wilder.)
One of these days, I promise, I will be Cthulu. But that costume is going to be TOUGH.
To Carn, I don’t think the author mentioning the kids talking about zombie apocalypses was the tenderfooted one. Amity Schlaes seemed to have been trying to make a point that Halloween is simply filling a “faith void” that we should be actively trying to fill with real faith. Not that Halloween filling it is inherently bad, but that it shows that we, as a culture, have failed our kids if they have to keep finding surrogates for their needs for faith. The other writer, who is the one quoting Amity Schlaes, Mollie Hemingway, simply seems to disapprove of the “scary demonic” part of it and, thus, comes off a bit lame.
Christmas is still my favorite. Familial warmth trumps cheap fun every time.
Halloween began to take off as a prime-time holiday around the period when adults decided to join in the fun back in the `70s. Prior to that era, it was considered primarily a holiday for children to dress up as cowboys or princesses and panhandle for candy and other treats from their neighbors. But once the grownups (sort of–mainly college students initially) started to host Halloween costume parties, what had been a minor autumnal intermission gradually took on a status requiring the industry that now rivals Christmas in terms of its over-the-top commercialism.
In other words, it has less to do with a vacuum of orthodox faith than it does with money (on the part of candy manufacturers et al.) and an excuse to signal the start of the holiday seasons’ bigger guns, Thanksgiving and Christmas, where consumers are concerned. It’s a long time between Labor Day and Christmas, and people do like to party. You know?
P.S. People also jump at the chance to make fools of themselves in public, particularly if said self-abasement comes with a societal imprimatur.
I last participated in Halloween in 1970. I was 13.
Even before that I found it to be a less than satisfying day, (that is perhaps because my parents chose to protect me from myself and always pared down my haul while I slept that night.)
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In the end, I think that the whole concept of dressing up and committing extortion (Trick or Treat? Give me something or else…) just didn’t float my boat.
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Of course as my two kids were growing up my wife expressed to me the degree to which she considered me to be a Wet Blanket, but it was never a contentious debate.
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In all, I still find the day to be less than satisfying and cannot fully understand the fascination many have with it.
As a writer, I’m normally prone to pseudo-intellectual cud-chewing over things like this, but I have to say I just unabashedly love Halloween. It was the night when Things walked the earth, when we were expected to be out after dark, when you got to be Something Else. In a way, it was a fantasy: you weren’t just kids any more, you were a pirate or a skeleton or (in my case) Hans Christian Andersen’s Snow Queen. Every kid likes to think of themselves as more mature than they are, and on Halloween, you were.
Adults still live the fantasy, but in a different way. Instead of being grown-up, they get to be . . . well . . . kids. It’s a night free of responsibility for them.
My family never really worried about any unfortunate connotations of the holiday. Over the years I was a kabuki actor, the Snow Queen, a mercenary, a giant spider, a wandering samurai–it was all just fun. And we lived near Gov. Blagojevich (back when he was still governor, and not convict number X), who used to give out full-sized candy bars, not the silly fun-size ones. Guess he could afford it.
Tomorrow, I’m going to another Halloween party. I’m almost 24, and I’ll be going in costume; a group of friends are doing a collective costume as the Seven Deadly Sins, and they asked me to be their Wrath. I’ll come home late, take off my makeup, and probably check the Wall Street Journal and PJ Media before hitting the rack. A little harmless fantasy at the death of the year.
a group of friends are doing a collective costume as the Seven Deadly Sins,
Now that’s funny. Ha!
Horsecrap.
Most of the things people pass around about Halloween are two-bit scare-the-fundies old wives’ tales and urban myths. Total number of actual cases of people passing out drugged or poisoned candy on halloween? ZERO, for as far back as records are kept. Actual origin of the “occultic” themes of halloween? The Catholic Church, whose monks in the 14th century started passing out fables about the Celtic holiday “Samhain” (literal translation: “Summer’s End”) to gas each other up about the villainous heathens they’d subjugated. Its true origins were as a harvest festival… and like most holidays celebrated today, it was commandeered by the Holy Roman Empire and kludged with a hodgepodge of other cultural celebrations and observations.
Why is Halloween getting a big boost lately? Might have something to do with the fact that it’s the biggest day for candy sales in the year. Candy companies make millions on beggar’s night. Or maybe it’s just the turn of the tides; holiday celebrations wax and wane over the decades for everything. (The historical track of Christmas is an epic drama in and of itself; at one time it was regarded as heathen and carnal to celebrate the day, just as it’s regarded as overtly Christian and “religiously biased” now.)
Or maybe we can get past our sour Old Fart Syndrome and just admit that people, in good times and hard, will look for any excuse to dress up, go out and party.
“Most of the things people pass around about Halloween are two-bit scare-the-fundies old wives’ tales and urban myths ”
Yes, people being poisoned during Halloween is largely/entirely an urban myth. But it was quite a potent one when I was a kid, as the late sixties hangover was just starting.
“maybe we can get past our sour Old Fart Syndrome”
Yes, I agree — based on the tone of your comment, that might be something you should consider working on. Lighten up, Francis!
Merchants are behind much of the growth in Halloween’s popularity. They promote it because there’s money to be made. I doubt that the increased prominence of Halloween is due to anything more profound than that.
The reason I like Halloween is that it reminds us that *most* people are kind and good and generous. What other time of year are people opening their doors to total strangers and handing out (expensive) candy for free? I like Halloween because it’s silly and scary and fun. For most people, it’s innocent and a time to pass down traditions to your children. It’s a celebration of our culture. I understand how some might equate it with evil, but then again, as has been said before, both Christmas and Easter are also from pagan traditions.
I have always loved Hallowe’en. Always. A night of dress-up and pretend to be something you’re not. And the best costumes were *always* ones we put together ourselves.
But I have a slightly different perspective. I went to a Lutheran grade school (K through 8th). October 31 was the day Luther nailed the 95 Theses to the church door in Wittenburg (since All Saints Day was a day of obligation, meaning mandatory church attendance, he knew everybody would see them). As a result, we would spend the entire month of October doing our “Outline of the Life of Luther”. October 31, to me, is inextricably wound up in strains of “A Mighty Fortress” and stories about John Tetzel and the Diet at Worms.
Which only makes it a more personal holiday for me. Pagan origins? Possibly. I couldn’t care less, to be honest. For some people it’s a pagan holiday. For others it’s Reformation Day. For still others it’s merely a great party day.
Rock on. I’ll be the one sitting on my front step with makeup to look like I’m a victim of the Black Death, hoping to scare trick or treaters out of their socks. (bwahahahahahahaha)
I loved Halloween when I was a kid back in the 50s. There were no razor-in-the-apple scares, no prohibitions on candy and most of the costumes were homemade. There were also no streetlights where we lived in a semi rural town in the midwest. We would get dressed up and our dad would grab a flashlight and off we went. We knew all the people in the houses we visited and they acted like they didn’t know us, but gave us a lot of candy which we ate every piece. Now, I like carving pumpkins.
What a crock of malarky! People in this nation will argue about anything and with this issue, the proof is in the pumpkin or jack-0-lantern.
I’m 66. I still have my favorite Halloween noise maker. It’s 62 years old. I keep it because it is part of cherished memories of all the fun our family and friends had at Halloween. Most of our costumes were home made. Sometimes we had masks. We carried a sack and those pasteboard jack-o-lanterns or black cat heads with a little light inside. In those days, we did real “trick or treating” (not dirty tricks) after dark. We had to have a riddle or joke or jingle to earn our treats. Speaking of treats, the best were home made caramel apples and popcorn, cupcakes, brownies, cookies and taffy. No one ever heard of someone putting something bad in the treats. Candy was cheap. We always came home with a haul from our blue collar neighborhood. It was spooky too. The darker the night the better. A few of the neighbors got together and set up some scary surprises. It was a blast and the whole neighborhood participated.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot the pumpkin carving ritual with the kitchen table covered with newspaper and pumkin guts. We always had the great debate over what face Dad would carve and what shape the eyes would be. Finally we started buying more pumpkins. I remember the smells of pumkin, burnt cork, make-up, burning candles and the cool brisk night air with whiffs of coal fired furnaces.
I feel sorry for kids today. They have a fraction of the fun that we had in the days before TV, air conditioning, political correctness, pseudo-psychology, religious fanaticism, psycho-creeps and law suits.
Things started to change around the time I went to Vietnam. Two tours later, the America in which I grew up, was gone – forever. Tejano Jack
Halloween has become the new Christmas. Judging from the decorations, some folks have way too much time and more disposable income than I’d expect in this economy. That said, my parents did decorate our South Jersey tract-house as a haunted house, though not with the lights and store-bought decorations of today, and I used to map out our housing development like a military campaign, scoring a couple of large bags of treats. Maybe folks want to use holidays now to take their minds off the steady disintegration of the country. I will link to this from my Old Jarhead blog.
Robert A. Hall
Author: The Coming Collapse of the American Republic
(All royalties go to a charity to help wounded veterans)
For a free PDF of the book, write tartanmarine(at)gmail.com
I always thought of it as a semi-holiday for kids. Lately, however, it seems that it’s been taken over by semi-adults looking for yet another reason for parties and drinking.
Call me what you will, I loathe Halloween, always have, always will. My first experience with it was as a brand new young immigrant, having arrived in California about two weeks into October, living in a ground floor apartment in a residential suburb. While having dinner with my husband, knock on the door, greedy kids yelling trick or treat, I didn’t know what to do as I had nothing to give them. Later our children would go out when we had nothing else planned for them, but most of the time we made sure there was something else for them to do. Altogether, while growing up, the three of them probably went out with friends a half dozen times and in home made costuming. Certainly after the age of 12 they were too old. For those who think poor children, I can say that they are all successful, well adjusted adults with their own children. Halloween is strictly a boon for candy manufacturers, costume makers in China, dentists, and most likely child molesters. The candy is bad all around and from what I understand parents throw most of it away, so much for waste and the environment. Anyway, for years now I leave my house before it gets too dark and stay away until the kiddies have all gone home with the loot that they don’t need.
I love Halloween. The only holiday that has no obligation to visit relatives or become a better person.
“The only holiday that has no family obligations to visit relatives” Thats one of the reasons why Memorial Day, July 4th, and Labor Day are my favorite holidays. Except unlike Halloween, those holidays are a day off from work and the occur in warm weather months .
I personally love Halloween. you don’t need to buy presents, you don’t feel left out if you don’t have a boyfriend (eg Val Day), but you still get parties and candy and great things to eat, and cute little kids dress up as the latest Disney characters. what’s not to like?!
btw, the “manipulative CS Lewis”? please! the Narnia books were the gospel story in parable form, the same way Jesus taught. was Jesus manipulative too, Amity?
My thoughts on halloween?
Here in my state the schools and cities do not call this holiday “halloween” anymore it’s called everything from Fall Holiday to meccafest.
Halloween is a bad word and concept that the people in charge are doing their damndest to destroy and change to something that has nothing to do with costumes, candy or fun.
Trick or treaters? I haven’t had a trick or treater in almost four years come by for treats.
Halloween is dead and fall holiday is the replacement.
When you have to check with the laws of the land before chosing a costume to ensure you do not offend some group or religious doctrine it’s no longer a kids holiday.
Halloween is fun. It is alive and well in my old, established neighborhood. We dress up, throw a party, hand out candy to adorable kids in their little costumes. It is just simple fun. An excuse to dress up, let our hair down, have a good time.
I think the problem comes when people over-think and over-analyze something and turn it into something it doesn’t need to be. I miss the innocence of the 70′s when even the church had a spook-house and the pastor dressed up too! The world has become too politically-correct. Things only have the power you give them.
For many years, Hallowe’en was the “gay national holiday,” because it was the one time when someone dressing in drag did not immediately risk arrest. For this reason, drag balls were a longtime Hallowe’en tradition in the homosexual community. Adults in the society at large indulged in the occasional Hallowe’en festivity, but the holiday was not a matter of major mainstream observance.
One can understand the members of a minority group using the holiday as a “festival of misrule” on which to act out; it is those most discontented with who or what they are that most eagerly embrace the opportunity to temporarily become someone else. It is, therefore, disturbing that the opportunity to express this discontent has been so much more broadly embraced in recent decades by so many adults in the society at large. That the growth of this embrace has paralleled the wider vocalness, visibility, and political success in the larger society of the one subculture that formerly celebrated Hallowe’en as its “national holiday” is, I am sure, coincidental.