Opinion/Brown: Halloween provides a timeline of how we've changed as a society
Halloween may have a long and complex history, but today it’s more a creature of the marketplace than anything else. Last year, Americans spent over $10 billion on Halloween — over $3 billion on candy alone. Dentists must love Halloween.
When I was a boy, Halloween had us going door to door, trick-or-treating our neighbors. Mostly, it was a chance to actually see who lived in the houses around the neighborhood. One time, I popped into the church down the street where there seemed to be a lot of kids — and they wouldn’t let us leave until it was time to go home.
I realize now that many of my elderly neighbors were just lonely. They’d invite us into their foyer where the candy was arrayed in crystal bowls and ask us our names and where we went to school. They’d really look at our costumes and ask about them — anything to make it last. A generation later, I took my 5-year-old daughter around and an old fellow invited us in — and regaled us with tunes on the violin.
I have a photograph from that Halloween. That year, I was teaching in a boarding school. Little Julie was in my arms when a big fellow approached us in the dining room. He was headless in his costume, peering out of a buttonhole as he lurched towards us. Julie let out a scream of terror and the boy, realizing he’d really scared her, pulled his head out where she could see him and apologized. The photograph catches her in mid-scream.
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So here’s an interesting feature of Halloween: we may get dressed up scary — but we don’t actually want to scare anybody. So why do we do it?
I think we like pretending more than we’re willing to admit. Halloween is a chance to be somebody else. These don’t come along all that often. Little kids get to be monsters. Often, adults play along and act terrified; the kids giggle inside their rubber masks and it’s a good time. Little girls sometimes dress as ballerinas or as fairy princesses.
It doesn’t take a lot of TV before children make up their own minds about what things confer power in adult life. Superheroes have power. Monsters have power. Sexy women have power. So those tend to be the costumes. Kids don’t always believe what we tell them. Instead, they watch.
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We had comic book heroes back in the 50s, too. Superman was my guy, but Captain Marvel had a better gimmick. All he needed to turn himself from an ordinary young man into a caped wonder was to say his magic word, “Shazam!” Maybe all the rest of us needed was to discover what our magic password was and we’d have superpowers, too.
Comic book villains enjoyed doing evil for evil's own sake. Maybe ideology is just a canvas to smear your power onto. That’s how it seemed then. So powerful did evil seem, good people could be overwhelmed by it … were overwhelmed by it save for the intervention of heroes with superpowers. That’s a scary worldview when you think about it.
Apparently, over a third of us believe in ghosts. In my years of teaching, more of my students believed in ghosts than believed in angels … an odd thing since both ideas are supernatural. Far fewer kids went to church in my last decades of teaching than used to, but while their belief in religious things dropped, the idea of the supernatural still had a grip. (In recent polls, angels do better among adults than ghosts do, in case you were asking.)
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Whatever happened to the old trick-or-treat? It would be nice to see the little kids going from door to door again, but we haven’t seen children at our door in almost 20 years. Maybe we’ve lost trust in our neighbors. Despite all the urban myths about razor blades slipped into apples, there were fewer than 100 documented cases of candy-tampering in the whole 20th century. But maybe we’re more willing to believe bad things about each other than we used to.
So our children still get to dress up, but their activities are far more organized — and far more supervised.
Meanwhile, all the best fright masks I’ve seen recently have been on TV — on political ads. The spooky visages of Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi do a better job of scaring us than all the “ghoulies, ghosties and long-legged beasties” ever did.
Lawrence Brown is a columnist for the Cape Cod Times. Email him at columnresponse@gmail.com.
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This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Halloween then and now reveals how we have changed as a society
