Halloween is the best holiday
On candy, community and the value of being silly.
My relationship with Halloween is, well, complicated.
As a kid — like virtually every kid — I LOVED it. I mean, people handing out free candy? Dressing up in costume? What’s not to like?
My opinion of the holiday changed— drastically — once I hit college. We would go to the same parties — with the same people — that we always went to. Except — wait for it! — this time it was a costume party!
Because I was, uh, terrible at planning (and, really, forethought of any sort), I never had any costume. (This was in the days before you could order a costume on Amazon for cheap — and have it within a day. You know, the olden days.)
Which meant that I would show up in some lame outfit — “I’m going as myself” — and spend the entire night feeling self conscious. Not so fun!
In my 20s, the holiday mostly consisted of me rushing to the local CVS to buy candy at 6 pm on Halloween night so that I could have something to give the (very few) kids who came a-knocking.
Then I had kids. And everything changed.
The first few years were filled with dressing them up (as they cried) to get a few good pictures for the grandparents (and Instagram). Which was fun!
But, I truly began to (re)appreciate Halloween when my boys got to be about 4 or 5.
Here’s why: To see the world through a kid’s eyes is WONDERFUL. It’s to experience pure joy. Free candy! And all I have to do is say “trick or treat”!
No matter how my day, week or even month had been going up to that point, I always felt better on Halloween night. I made a point of leaving work early so I could be home just as the sun was setting (and the kids were going out). It affirmed my faith in people. They took the time to decorate their houses. They went out and got candy. They smiled when you came to the door.
There’s also a communal aspect to Halloween that I think is drastically underrated.
While Christmas regularly ranks as peoples’ favorite holiday (Halloween is second or third), it tends to be a holiday you spend with family. Everything is closed. You sit around at your house (or a relative’s house.) And eat. And open presents. I mean, it’s pretty great.
But, what Christmas lacks is a sense of the broader community. Halloween is a holiday you celebrate with friends and neighbors — literally. You walk around to your neighbors’ houses. You knock on their doors. They come out, greet you and hand your kids candy.
Like, how great is that? I don’t know about you but I don’t have that many interactions with my neighbors these days. But, once a year, you get to see them, say hi and check in.
And, at least in my neighborhood, people have started to make Halloween a whole family thing. It’s not just handing candy out to the kids. They have snacks for adults. Beer. A fire to gather around. (Solo Stove for the win!)
It’s the one time a year — in my world — where everyone (or at least most people) are out of their houses. And in a good mood.
In a world where we are increasingly isolated (thanks iPhone!) and lonely, Halloween is a moment when the community comes together to celebrate. Which is a very good thing.
There’s one other underrated thing about Halloween that’s worth mentioning here: It’s an excuse to act silly.
We live in a dangerous and often frightening world. Mass shootings. Foreign wars. Democracy in peril. And a million other reasons — large and small — to feel down or depressed or hopeless or all three at once.
But the truth is that we — all of us — need to be able to feel joy. To laugh. To shake off the struggles of daily life and, per my point above, see the world the way our kids do if only for a few hours.
It’s impossible to put on a Luigi costume or dress as Travis Kelce or Taylor Swift or a witch or a ghost or a bat or Wednesday Addams or whatever and not feel like you have more license to live it up a bit — even for just a few hours on one night of the year.
We ALL need that. Kids grasp this intuitively. They know that being silly — or what we adults would call “blowing off steam” — is good for your mental and physical health. Us adults are so busy planning our careers and our families and, well, everything, that we forget that play is critically important. We have to be able to have fun and, yes, laugh at ourselves.
My kids are a little older now. Old enough that having their dad trail along next to them (or within a country mile of them) on Halloween would be horribly mortifying.
So, tonight, they will take to the streets (well, hopefully, the sidewalks) alone on their quests for candy. And I will be at home, handing out candy to the masses.
But I will say a little thank you — now and again later tonight — for my boys. For helping me see the true meaning of Halloween.
Since I was negative, I'll post my favorite Halloween standing my ground story:
In Oct. 1995, I was 10. The Braves won the World Series on Oct. 28 so for Halloween, I decided to go as "Braves fan," wearing my hat, jersey (still fits!) and World Series Champions shirt. My homeroom teacher even said we could wear hats if it was part of our costume.
Cut to Halloween and Mrs. Pregiato told me to remove my hat. I said it was part of my costume. She said "Braves fan" was not a costume, since I wore Braves stuff everyday. (True!) A Mexican standoff ensued and I said what does it matter, this is what I'm going as today, this is how I chose to dress up, why are you treating me differently?
Mrs. Pregiato, already praying for summer after only having me for two months, backed down and let me wear my Braves hat. I proceeded to wear Braves stuff for the next month and I could feel the hate in her eyes.
Chris, thank you, a nice tribute to Halloween. As a young child, I loved it but by age 10/11, I started hating it. I stopped going out and figured it all wasn’t as cracked up as I thought. I hated dressing up by that point, thought it was all just plain dumb. Became a parent and it was so much fun and I got into it all over again. As a young child, my son loved it and we had a great neighborhood. A bunch of parents took the kids around as a group. A few years we had 10-15 kids, usually moms out with the kids and dads home giving out candy at their own house. Dads may have joined for a little bit. My son then turned 11/12 and he wasn’t thrilled with dressing up. He would be a baseball player or hockey player, just putting on his gear that he had and call it a day. He stopped going out until he hit high school and a group of boys with go to neighborhoods that gave out “full size” candy bars. My son was still just going out as a baseball player or something. Then after a couple of h years of that, gave up on it all together. Now, we are expecting our first grandchild and I can already feel that fun aspect of Halloween. As far as what we are doing, late afternoon going to a neighbors house and having a pot luck on their driveway. There will be about 15 of us, we all bring our candy and give it out as a group, while eating and talking. We did it last year and it was fun. We don’t have a lot of kids in our neighborhood.