It Was Night in the Lonesome October

The sentinel

I don’t usually write four blogs in a row that are Halloween-related. A look back shows that in most years I don’t post even one. Perhaps the grinning guardian by my door this year keeps reminding me of the holiday every time I enter and leave. The posts are a way of tipping him for his service – not that he likely will be called upon to greet costumed strangers.

A long way for candy bar

My driveway is just long enough to deter trick-or-treaters. It is too much work to walk all the way up to my house for a single handful of candy. Furthermore, after dusk my driveway is spooky, and the point of Halloween is to laugh at fear, not actually to experience it. Not just kids but adults frequently get spooked in and around my house at any time of year. At night there are sounds of sizeable creatures moving in the woods that unnerve some guests. I doubt ghosts and goblins are responsible for any of the crepitation; deer are the most common source though there is the occasional bear or coyote. So, I don’t get many kids coming to my door on October 31. Not one ever has walked up the driveway. On rare occasion neighbors on my street will drive up to the house and walk their kids to the door, but in two decades of Halloweens I can count the number of times that has happened on one hand.

A visitor sniffs around my driveway

This is unlike the town center or any local side street where the houses are less than 100 feet (30m) apart. Residents there are visited by scores of kids – sometimes hundreds. Nowadays the homeowners meet the kids’ parents, too. Back in the ancient days of my childhood parents accompanied only very small children. By the time we were 8 or 9, while we didn’t typically go out alone (groups of between two and six were commonplace), we did go without parents. Someone probably would call the police if unaccompanied 9-year-olds, even if in a pack, went door to door today. 13-year-olds are unaccompanied (usually) even today because a 13-year-old would rather not go out at all than be seen with a parent, but no one younger unless (sometimes) in the company of a late teen sibling.

My scariest Halloweens were in my teens, but not because I was in the spirit of the moment. Halloween (and the night before) have a less harmless tradition than cadging candy: vandalism. Most of it is relatively minor: egging, soaping windows, toilet papering, pumpkin smashing, and the like. Some, however, is not minor at all. My dad was a builder and construction sites seem to be a special draw to marauding teens. Over the years they did substantial damage including broken windows, spray-painted obscenities, and slashed tires on construction vehicles. So, by age 16 I had been drafted into guard duty on construction sites on the last two nights of October. If you want to spend a spooky Halloween, spend it alone (before cell phones) in an unlit, unfinished house on a dark wooded lot.

Sis and I in my earliest Halloween
pic. 1954, I think.

We tend not to think of Halloween as a cultural ritual, but that is what it is. There are harsh truths about life from which children cannot be protected for long. There really are monsters in the world (albeit not supernatural) and the harshest truth of all is that life ends. There are worse and less healthy ways to learn to deal with all that than by mocking it with graveyard humor, which at bottom is the point of the holiday. The sugary treats help, too. Below a certain age kids don’t grasp the darker elements of course, so they are happy to wear (as in my old photo) bunny suits. (A teen might wear a bunny suit, too, but only as irony.) In a few years, though, they will want something edgier like a vampire or zombie, which is menacing but has advantage of being mythical.

For adults the lampooning of mortality is more straightforwardly cathartic, since it is more imminent. As the size of the Greenwich Village parade demonstrates, the holiday is enduringly popular with adults, and it always has been more merry than morbid. Many costumes, of course, are purely fanciful in the manner of a masquerade ball with no reference to the holiday’s origins. In nearby Morristown, a typical midsize town, the streets fill with bar-hopping costumed 20-somethings as dusk falls on October 31. I realize the whole thing must seem odd to those raised outside the tradition, but the ongoing spread of the holiday into seemingly unlikely countries indicates it does have cross-cultural appeal.

So, this year, a jack-o’-lantern guards the door once again. (For more on pumpkin jack-o’-lanterns, see an older blog How Do You Say Isqoutm?) While I expect no rings of the doorbell from costumed nippers, I am prepared with a candy bucket just in case. As for the musical selection below, as an unrepentant carnivore I can relate to a fear of being stalked by celery.

Les Brown & Doris Day – Celery Stalks at Midnight (1941)