Halloween: I'll Pass

Each holiday comes with it's own brand of unpleasantness and disappointment. New Year's Eve offers forced joviality along with the prospect of being French kissed by a blowzy stranger with Cold Duck on her breath. Christmas means spending lots of thought and money on presents for people who already have way too much stuff and enduring long hours with folks you'd never spend five minutes with if you didn't share a smidge of DNA.

However, most holidays also have an upside. Thanksgiving often brings out the charitable side of people who donate to food drives and volunteer too serve dinner to those in need. Easter signals the final days of winter and sometimes the final round of the Masters.

Then, there's Halloween, the holiday, with no redeeming features. For starters, it's not even a proper "holiday" because nobody gets to miss school or work.

When I was a kid, instead of getting the day, or even a half-day off, we got to (or, rather, were forced to) go to a "Halloween Harvest Festival." This meant being marched en masse to the gym where the PTA had set up booths selling Halloween "treats". One year we went early in the morning and Gail McDonald, the girl who sat behind me, bought a candied apple, a ridiculous concoction that manages to obliterate the wonderful qualities of both candy and apples. She spent all day gnawing away at her prize and finally finished it off around two o'clock that afternoon.

At two-fifteen, just as I had been called on to read aloud from "The Song of Hiawatha," I heard a low gurgling sound from behind me. This was followed by a splat as Gail heaved her recently-digested treasure onto the back of my neck. Gail burst into tears and was sent to the school nurse while I, whose situation was equally distressing, was told to go to the boys' bathroom and "rinse off." When I returned, I was commanded to continue reading the Longfellow classic as my classmates showed their sympathy by holding their noses and fanning the air with sheets of notebook paper.

Also, on October 31 in various years, I have been bitten by my own dog, had my cornea scratched after my cousins threw me into a rose bush and caught German measles from a girl dressed as Roy Orbison. Last year, I returned from a Halloween Bonfire (a Vermont tradition) at my neighbors' to find a message from the state police saying my wife had been in a car wreck. She's okay now, but it was a long winter of hospital stays interspersed with battles with the insurance company.

Of course, it's no wonder bad things happen on Halloween, considering its basic premise. The other holidays, with all their faults, espouse positive ideas - gratitude, celebration, etc. Halloween, on the other hand, is based on the bizarre idea that somehow it's fun to increase the general level of fear. I was brought up in the fifties. Between polio and the prospect of nuclear war, I didn't - and still don't - need any additional stimuli to provoke anxiety attacks and nightmares. In fact, I think we should ditch Halloween and replace it with something like a National Day of Reassurance. Just think how much better it would be if society's institutions, along with the greeting card industry, focused their energy on offering comfort, instead of terror, to a citizenry already jittery over dwindling retirement accounts, rising global temperatures and kids with so-so SAT's? I say it's worth a try.

By the way, I'm also not that crazy about the taste of Pumpkin.

--By Tom Maxwell

Comments

[drblack]

Halloween today is about FUN,especially for Kids.
It also has an underlying message about the inevitability of Death.
Halloween is my favorite holiday.
Xmas is the worst in Modern America...it is all about stress and consumerism.

[abigcheese]

Wow, that was kind of a downer.

Halloween is my favorite holiday. It's the only holiday where strangers pay money (candy) to give generously to kids. All the other holidays are family/friend oriented, so you only interact with the people you know. But Halloween creates a broader community. Who doesn't love opening their door to children dressed up as princesses and superheroes?

Plus, Halloween is creative. "What do I want to be for Halloween?" It's the one day of the year you can dress up as Marilyn Monroe or Marilyn Manson without ridicule. You can be whatever you want!

And what about pumpkin carving? It's awesome! Your hands get all slimy and gooey, and then you take the seeds, roast them, and eat them!

Anyway, there are plenty of lovely things about Halloween. Look for them, or create them.

[Treehuggindirtworshiper]

To abigcheese:

I like the way you think! How many times a year do grownups get to dress up and act like kids and it's OK! Love the pumpkin carving and roasted seeds! My pumpkin puked it's seeds this year!

[mredder4]

Halloween stems from the ancient tradition of acknowledging Death as a cultural force, something that America and the West has much trouble with these days. It used to be that people understood that life is a cycle and death is a part of it. Bygone cultures annually celebrated the new life of spring and the harvest of summer before the necessary entropy in autumn required before the winter to make the ground ready for the repeat next year. And these were people who lived in a much more superstitious time than we do now. That they dealt with death and reality so much better than we do is depressing, for anyone hoping that human culture is advancing and not receding.

America is so fixated on this idea of "curing" death and living forever that we refuse to admit the fundamental truth that everyone you have known, everyone you know, and everyone that you will ever meet is going to pass away someday. Halloween SHOULD be the time in which we acknowledge the fact of death while celebrating our continued victory over it.

"National Day of Reassurance"? Are you kidding me?

[rjmiller]

Halloween has the best redeeming factor of any holiday of the year: sexiness.

[ArthurTwoShedsJackson]

Wow, and I thought Charlie Brown had it tough.

[InternationalObserver]

What stuns/surprises me most is that we whilst we teach our kids about 'stranger danger' for 364 days a year, there is ONE day a year when we encourage them to dress up and wander the streets soliciting for candy from people they don't know.

It must be manna from heaven for paedophiles.

Yes yes I know it's 'safe' because good parents will accompany their children as they go trick or treating, but out in the real world there are parents who send their six year old out with their older sibling thinking that is safe enough. And of course the older sibling ditches the younger kid first chance they get to go hang out in the park with their friends.

Only in America...

[rini]

I don't like horror movies and I don't love pumpkin either.

Still, I love dressing up and I love the small little bit of extremely fake evil that we get to pretend to every year. I think that Halloween is the holiday that is not sappy or full of tradition.

Of course, we could do more. Unicef boxes are not as ubiquitous as they were when I was a kid. Also, I do think there should be more done about the source of our candies (China and Africa.) There are movements for fair trade candy etc...We should expand on them. Halloween can be generous and creepy (In a good way.)

[rockchick]

It may be just a fun (or not-fun) holiday for most, but for me and my co-religionists, it's the most sacred night of the year.

Yes, folks, we're Witches. And Pagans. And this night of Samhain (pronounced sah-win) is the night when, the veil between the worlds being thinnest, our beloved dead return from the other side to be with us.

We're not the only ones. Giant swatches of Latin-American countries have likewise their Day of the Dead, when they take picnics to their loved ones' graves and have a party, telling them the news of the past year.

Samhain is also the Celtic New Year, the beginning of winter, when the God (demonized by Christians as the Devil) takes up his rule for the next six months. Not surprisingly for a totemic hunting people like the Celts, he was portrayed as a tall man with the antlers of a stag. You can see where the "error" crept in. Uh-huh.

So while your kids are going into sugar shock from all the crap they stuff their faces with, spare a thought for something altogether more ancient, solemn and joyous. And wish us a Happy New Year.

[JBS]

It's mildly amusing to see how many so called adults will demean themselves acting like children, dressing up for Halloween. The stupidest, in my opinion, are the knuckleheads who buy costumes so they can dress up their dogs or cats.

[rini]

If you can't act silly and have some fun without seeing it as "demeaning," well, that's kind of sad.

[vigwig]

Yeah, that's it, let's ban any holidays that make you uncomfortable due to your personal history.

There are many (including me) who love Halloween:

It's fun to dress up and be silly and act a role
It's creative
You don't have to cook
You don't have to buy presents
You can ignore your relatives (except the kids)
You make other people happy giving treats and charming them with costumes.

While there are some obvious drawbacks (monitoring what your kids eat, dealing with tricks: egging, TP'ing the house, etc.) on the whole Halloween is an innocent pile of fun.

[carrieanna]

Haha, poor you.

I have funny memories of a dog breaking free from the front door of a house and chasing after my brother, whose Spiderman costume got shredded at the leg. My brother had a fear of dogs for a few years after that. I still laugh at that memory...even though it's with total sympathy for my poor brother.

But then I also remember the housefull of teenage boys dancing around in their white briefs and being quite confused as an 8 or 9 year old. And those terrible plastic masks that made your face sweaty! Or having to bundle up underneath the thin smock-like store-bought costumes because we inevitably got a cold front the day before Halloween.