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
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It also has an underlying message about the inevitabil
Halloween is my favorite holiday.
Xmas is the worst in Modern America...
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/fri
Plus, Halloween is creative. "What do I want to be for Halloween?
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.
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!
America is so fixated on this idea of "curing" death and living forever that we refuse to admit the fundamenta
"National Day of Reassuranc
It must be manna from heaven for paedophile
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...
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.)
Yes, folks, we're Witches. And Pagans. And this night of Samhain (pronounce
We're not the only ones. Giant swatches of Latin-Amer
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 surprising
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.
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 (monitorin
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...e
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-boug