Halloween

As Halloween is upcoming, I thought I'd write about my thoughts on the holiday. It's certainly one for which I hold a great deal of affection. In previous writings, I have noted that Christmas is about the four elements of Judeo/Christian mythology, pagan mythology, generalized secular winter festival, and a sense of goodwill. So too can Halloween be broken down into the disparate elements that give it its appeal. After all, although some adults (like my mother) consider it to be a holiday strictly for kids, Halloween has an appeal that goes well beyond the time where you start looking out of place carrying around an orange pail begging door to door for candy. Throughout my adulthood, I have seen so many people from so many walks of life. After giving it a little thought, I think just about anybody who isn't being whatever the Halloween equivalent of Ebenezer Scrooge can enjoy Halloween if they wish to do so. They'll enjoy the costumes, the candy, the kitschy horror, or the serious horror. Obviously, the more of the elements of Halloween they enjoy, the better their overall enjoyment is to ultimately be, but one may get by with just one. Each of these elements will get their own paragraph here as I explain who I think enjoys each element the most and why.

Costumes are probably the silliest aspect of Halloween for naysayers, but those who look forward to the one day a year when adults can go anywhere and do anything dressed-up as creatively as they like is a day worth celebrating. The specifics of why costumes appeal to people seems to vary. Serious makeup artists like to push the boundaries of what their creativity can achieve. Gore hounds like to put more time and energy than I can ever imagine into make-up that will repel and frighten in equal measure. Geeks take the opportunity to essentially turn it into cosplay day, and I've done my time as a knight, ghostbuster, Freddy, Jason, Michael Meyers, The Mask, Skeletor and probably others I'm forgetting that would not be out of place in the halls of Comic-Con. Of course, many of us geeks don't quite have the bodies to effectively portay our favorites, but Halloween is the one time where you're completely allowed to do anything you want with a cosplay without fear of judgment. Perhaps it's a bit sexist, since these costumes are limited almost exclusively to women, but the sexy costume is certainly an entire genre unto itself. Generally, you just take a profession with an identifiable uniform, subtract material to the point where a prostitute would find it useful wardrobe, and Bob's your uncle. Comedy costumes are the last variety of which I can think and my Purple Pimp costume was certainly that. A ridiculous outfit with equally ridiculous accessories, I used it to make jokes that all the women around me in sexy costumes were me, "Hos."

Candy is probably Halloween's biggest star and like movie stars it is so popular because it just works in anything it's in. Valentine's Day, Easter, Christmas, and more show that candy is where it's at if you want your holiday to be loved. Of course, Halloween does take the concept of candy to its highest possible expression. Other holidays involve mythical creatures or loved ones giving you candy. Only on Halloween, however, can you go around your very own neighborhood and just knock on doors until your candy container is full. Being that you can only trick-or-treat when you're a kid, this is not a part of the holiday that adults can enjoy in the same way and I suspect it is the aspect of Halloween most responsible for it being considered a kid's holiday. We adults can certainly keep the tradition going by hosting our own trick-or-treaters, fulfilling what, I suppose, is the Halloween version of the circle of life. That's fair though, as adults have money to just buy, or make if you're inclined similarly to myself, our own candy. Something of a rite of passage occurs when kids go through the process of learning what exactly to seek out and avoid when it comes to candy. Wax lips, cheap off-brand taffy, circus peanuts, anything with nuts or rice, and sugarless gum were my personal biggest candy pet peeves. Living in a condo, there's nothing I can to to carry on the trick-or-treating tradition, but I do think that this what gets Halloween in everyone's heart when they're a kid.

The kitschy horror of Halloween is the part where we take what we're afraid of, which is mostly death, disease, and monsters, and turn it into something silly and camp. Monster Mash was probably the strongest example of this. Of course, so are The Munsters, The Addams Family, Elvira, and most of Tim Burton's career. You see it in most of the Halloween decorations out there. Most of the materials seem to be, at best, teetering on the edge of horror and comedy. There's one tradition that I recall being directly involved in in my teens. While I don't know precisely what to call it, it involves taking various food items and setting them out in a darkened room. Kids would come in, typically guided around while told a tale of a witch who had died and also that several of her body parts were still intact and in the room. Things proceeded to where they were instructed to feel the body parts, which were her brain (Jell-O mold), her hair (cold spaghetti), and her eyes (peeled grapes). Everyone can think of examples like this from their own personal experience. A few people I know even take special joy in the monster cereals based on classic Universal monsters. This aspect is what keeps everything from becoming too heavy or scary for small children and parents of small children.

Dark horror is where all the laughing stops and we simply face our fears. A man in my own childhood Halloweens used to wait in a coffin that seemed a decoration. He would rise from it as a vampire and terrify the living crap out of us little kids. That's a small taste of this complex and challenging aspect of Halloween that I freely confess I don't much enjoy. Even though I don't enjoy it, I respect it. Fear is a powerful emotion and exploring it is probably an extremely healthy thing to do. Some people legitimately enjoy doing this and I certainly understand the raw power with with they are apparently fascinated. Perhaps appropriately, this aspect weaves and creeps its way across the culture of Halloween in many respects. Disney's version of The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow, despite being a Disney cartoon, contains one of the most terrifying lines ever. When Brom Bones sings to Ichabod Crane about the various supernatural creatures he will face on his ride home from the Van Tassel party, the townsfolk join in and sing, "Some are fat. Some are thin. Some don't even wear their skin." This is plenty creepy, but, when I was growing up, churches would actually tell us to beware of Satanic cultists who would kidnap children and ritualistically abuse or murder them on Halloween night. As an adult, I learned of haunted houses beyond Disney's The Haunted Mansion. Actors jump out at you through the darkness as you pass through various scary scenarios. I never made it through.

So there you have it. Costumes, candy, kitschy horror, and dark horror. You've got to be quite the curmudgeon to not like any of that. As I prepare to dress up as Dilbert's Phil The Prince Of Insufficient Light, purchase candy and a Halloween cake, and dance idiotically to Monster Mash, I find myself swelling with affection for this great American holiday. Only Christmas holds more of my admiration.

-Frank