hallo-weenies

Well, today is Hallowe'en. I'm not doing much. I was invited to a party on Saturday but it was one of those "friend-of-a-friend" invited me things, so I didn't know how many people I ACTUALLY knew would be there - and besides, I was tired - so I rsvp'ed that I wasn't going but didn't elaborate why.

Tonight I plan to hand out candy. I bought little Kit Kat bars, and the little 3-Musketeers bars, and Snickers, and Milky Ways, and small bags of M&Ms - you know, the GOOD kind of candy.

And I realized - I didn't know the schedule for trick or treat.

So I asked someone with kids.

And she said, "Oh, just turn on your light when you're ready to start and turn it off when you're done." Apparently there's no formal house-to-house trick or treating in town any more. Instead, there are "events."

The downtown merchants' association does a Hallowe'en to-do. I presume it's partly to draw in parents to shop while their kids get sugared up. What really irks me about it though is how it's described: A Safe and Fun Halloween!

Um, yeah. The Safe part? You're implying that everyone else in town is carefully inserting straight pins or dope into their candy, so they can ruin the lives of children. THANKS A LOT! I mean, yeah, I know the whole stranger-danger thing, but it's kind of sad how kids have been raised to suspect everyone who's not mom and dad (or mom and boyfriend, or mom and "uncle." Especially when the most danger kids seem to face is from mom's boyfriends, and the random kindly spinster-lady down the street who wouldn't hurt a kid in a million years is seen as some kind of pervert, but ol' Chester who lives with Mom is perfectly okay - until he happens to drown one of the kids one day).

and Fun? Don't make me laugh. It's in the daylight. It's Officially Sanctioned. Therefore, it cannot be truly Fun. Trick or treating in the daylight is wrong. I even knew that as a kid - I was scandalized when I saw E.T. and saw the children trick or treating in the daylight. Again, I know, I know - safety is paramount. But my brother and all the neighborhood kids and I all trick or treated for YEARS after dark and no one ever died. Now, granted - we all had a parent or a much older sibling with us. And we had our parents look over our candy before we ate any. (And nothing suspect was ever found in either my brother's or my "hauls" - and we walked to heck and back up and down our long long street, and trick or treated at houses where we didn't know the people).

And the whole official-commerical ("Don't accept candy from anyone without an official badge!") part of it kind of makes me sad. Trick or treating was one of the few "naughty" feeling things I got to do as a kid - going out after dark, knocking on people's doors, being given stuff, dressing in funny clothes...it was fun. I do not think it would have been as fun if we had gone to the downtown area in the middle of the afternoon and gone from store to store.

Another thing that we did - well, they did it in town but I never got to participate - was there was a contest for hallowe'en pictures, and the winning pictures, the kids got to paint on store windows. The whole town looked cool. They don't do that here, or if there's any decorating, the store itself does it, and it's kind of commercial-lame.

I suppose the hospital will probably also open up their x-ray facility again to allow paranoid parents to x-ray their kids' candy haul. (I'd hate to break a bone today; can you imagine having to go through the gauntlet of anxious parents and impatient kids? "Sorry, moms and dads. You will have to wait a little bit while we figure out if this person's ankle is broken." I can just imagine some of the parents grumbling that they should not be made to wait).

I don't know. The whole devolution of Hallowe'en makes me sad - when I was a kid, it was a kids' holiday, a very grassroots thing - a few people decorated their yards but everyone handed out candy. Now it's changed into this big "officially sanctioned" day where businesses hand out candy and people hire companies to come decorate their lawn.

And I think that's the crux of it for me - it's once again, the moving away from the do-it-yourself ethos to the "leave it to the professionals" ethos. I saw it happen to Christmas - there are whole companies who will come and decorate your house so you don't "have" to do it - why? That's part of the fun of the thing. And you don't have to be super-elaborate-Martha-Stewarty. You can get a few red and green pillows, put up a wreath, maybe string some fairy lights - that might take an hour or two on a slack Saturday afternoon. I mean, if your house is less "done" than the neighbors, who gives a flip? It's YOUR HOUSE.

Maybe that's part of the leaving-it-to-the-professionals: it's become such a contest of keeping up with the Joneses that there's no joy in it any more for some people. And you know? When it comes to that, that's when I say STOP. That's when I say: if the holiday becomes a burden- if you're going into huge debt and having to schedule something like the invasion of a minor country, if you're having more of your holiday preparations done by hired help than by yourself or your family - that's when you should decide to scale back. Maybe don't celebrate for a year. Or only do the fun things.

But that seems to be the modern way - to compete, to slick-i-fy, to safetyize, until the fun for the individual is gone out of the celebration - in fact, the very reason for celebrating is gone (I would love to ask the insane Christmas lifestyle decorators if they bother to put up a creche scene, or if they go to Advent services), replaced by another set of obligations.

It seems we're too good in this society at turning fun into obligation. Is it a hangover of Puritanism - where everything enjoyable should be destroyed - or is it some kind of crazy 1980s/90s hangover where everyone is still operating in Venture Capitalist Mode and you are only as good as your ability to delegate?

I don't know, but I kind of rebel against the whole thing. I didn't decorate for Hallowe'en this year - partly I was too busy and partly things going on in my life made me feel my heart was not in it - but I still note the day. And I will decorate for Christmas in a few weeks - pull out my little fake tree, and put up my wreath, and maybe even string some fairy lights across my mantel. And if it looks tacky or under-done, I don't care. It's my decorations for my celebration.