This Old Kid’s Guide To Halloween
By most accounts, I am several times older than I should be to celebrate Halloween. I’m really the equivalent of a bunch of kids in a trench coat. Logistically, I’m old enough to buy my own candy. I can express myself through other means besides a costume. I can watch scary movies, read scary stories, and do scary stuff any day of the year.
I’m not making up for missing out on Halloween as a kid. I freakin’ loved Halloween when I was little, and partied with the best of them as a teenager. I more than filled my quota in my early years.
I don’t continue to partake in Halloween merriment because I’m a parent, either. There were many adult years when I didn’t have a rugrat around, and I still went overboard this time of year.
I’ve just always felt that any holiday is only as meaningful as what we ascribe to it. Halloween happens to be the one I feel is most meaningful, for the following reasons:
1. Maybe this is digging a little, but I appreciate Halloween as an acknowledgement of other cultures, and other traditions. It didn’t begin with ankle-biters donning plastic masks and capes and begging for candy. It’s also not demonic or psychopathic. We’ve strayed from its early roots a fair bit, but it is cool to point them out now and again. My Celtic ancestors probably took part in Halloween, back in the day.
2. I am a long-time, unashamed, card-carrying geek. Being a geek is all about showing your love for things-a movie, a TV show, a character, or a particular piece of traditional lore or pop culture. There is no other holiday that allows one to put one’s fixations on display like this one. Even as an adult, on Halloween, a geek can run through the streets declaring their admiration for Spider-man, their fascination with cephalopods, or their wish to grow up to be a sorcerer. Halloween is a geeky holiday.
3. I also love how one can exhaust oneself with joy on Halloween. These are small joys, but getting to stay up late, scouting the neighbourhood, swimming in processed sugar, and seeing scads of other humans doing the same are all joyful.
4. There’s an element of sharing and community to Halloween that feels especially meaningful at the moment. It’s just candy, maybe not even the best candy, but it’s candy that’s given out without question, to anyone who needs a little something. I don’t really care who shows up, how old they are, how much effort they put into their costume. I’m just glad that there are still creature comforts to pass along.
5. Most importantly, Halloween is an occasion that acknowledges something that gets pushed aside so often the rest of the year- that the world is a weird place, sometimes good-weird, sometimes interesting-weird, and most recently, scary- weird. It’s ironic that a holiday built on dressing up, putting up decorations, employing all sorts of tricks of artifice, is the one that is the most honest and genuine in this respect. Humans have a dark side, a mysterious side, an angry side. On Halloween, you can walk past a neighbour’s lawn that is littered with plastic entrails and corpses, and think (maybe even say out loud) “That’s messed up.” And it is messed up. We are messed up. Here, have a tiny chocolate bar! Halloween gives us a safe space to admit all of that, and miraculously, it sits comfortably alongside the elation and excitement of the day.
I might just be hanging on to Halloween for nostalgic reasons, refusing to grow up, or replaying all the fun and excitement from when I was little, but I’m also partaking of something that hits differently for me. It’s one night, it’s relatively inexpensive, it’s inclusive, and it’s something that actually speaks to me, that I participate in because it feels important, not just customary.
If anyone wants to wax philosophical over fun size candy, I will be out in my front yard, in a silly costume, this year and for as many years as I can manage.