What Happened to the Happy Side of Halloween?

Raise your hand if you miss those big, toothy grins. On pumpkins, that is. When I was a child, Halloween was about just four things: silly costumes, candy, jack-o'-lanterns, and orange UNICEF collection boxes. It was a happy children's holiday marred only by the occasional over-enthusiastic young ghost terrorizing a younger trick-or-treater and apocryphal tales of Bad People handing out poisoned lolly-pops.

Now, walking around my neighborhood in late October, I see tacky fake cobwebs stretched over long-suffering bushes, lawns planted with fake gravestones, skeletons galore, and maybe a plastic faux jack-o-lantern or two. It's all so . . . ugly. And this doesn't even take into account the various zestfully gory Halloween accouterments that kids can buy at the drugstore.

Now, I realize that the Day of the Dead is a traditional celebration (on November 1 in Mexico) that honors the dead with flowers and food, including sugar skulls. Dressed-up skeletons (catrinas) are part of the festivities. But the grim display outside so many American homes has little to do with folkloric custom. Store-bought "tombstones" and "skulls" are about marketing, not cultural meaning. Letting children buy stretchy pseudo-fabric made in China to mimic cobwebs teaches that the ersatz is preferable to the real, that buying is better than making.

More seriously, turning your lawn into a "graveyard" trivializes the awful finality of death. How are young children supposed to process the distinction between jaunty R.I.P. tombstones -- trotted out in October, packed up in November -- and the real one that forever marks the grave of a grandparent?

While the distant history of Halloween in America was truly scary, a night of pranks (trick or treat) that often turned dangerous or nasty, by mid-century, the holiday had reverted to the child-friendly one I remember. One of the nicest things about it was that -- like Thanksgiving, but even more so -- it wasn't about religion. Everyone could celebrate it.

The biggest thrill was figuring out what you would come as, and how you would assemble your costume from stuff around the house. I remember a friend of mine whose father was a creative director at at an ad agency deciding, perversely, to dress as a ghost. Dad was horrified at this blatant lack of creativity, probably deliberately intended to annoy him. Those were the years when my mother would pounce on my bag of goodies, ostensibly to claim a few choice pieces of candy for herself but actually to check on the edibility of my loot.

Carving the pumpkin was the ultimate challenge, particularly difficult because you were never able to practice. We didn't live in the country, so the pumpkin would need to be purchased. There was just one, and you had to bravely hack away at it, hoping the teeth wouldn't cave in, as they did the year before. Sometimes an expert would materialize, proposing the wisdom of drawing possible tooth outlines with a pen before making the first decisive cut.

Funny how a holiday devoted to tooth-rotting candy had so much to do with the creation of plausible teeth. But even a toothless pumpkin looked wonderful with a candle inside, the flickering yellow light that turned an orange husk into a magical object.

Ah, where are the pumpkins of yesteryear?

When good enough isn't

Experienced editors working know that there is never enough time to perfect every sentence of every lengthy document. And even if there were, people are fallible. Give a roomful of experienced editors a year to edit any piece of writing, and it's likely that they would still overlook some embarrassing error.

But in recent years, I've seen a downhill slide toward "good enough," which is sometimes more like "barely OK."

There are several reasons for this. One is the tyranny of speed. A job done as fast as possible has become more desirable than a job done at reasonable pace with fewer errors. Another reason is a growing cadre of People Who Don't Read Good Writing. If you don't read the good stuff, you aren't likely to write even passable stuff.

Volunteering, nonprofits, and the democratic fallacy

After years of working with nonprofits, and volunteering for several, I've come to understand how they work — or don't. A notion much beloved in the nonprofit world is that it's always important to listen to everyone.

Whether the issue is large or small, the prevailing belief is that a decision should not be made before asking for advice from all stakeholders. Decisions are postponed in the interest of compiling questionnaires and tabulating results. People who have no particular expertise related to the task -- whether developing competitive taglines or determining a chain-of-command structure -- are earnestly requested to weigh in.

And who doesn't love rendering an opinion? Our Web culture has emboldened people to feel qualified to deliver rants and raves about subjects they know next to nothing about. So a board member will remark that his nephew could write a better tagline. Or a committee member will protest that the old way is the best way. And each objection will be duly discussed . . . over hours and days and weeks.

The problems with this level playing-ground approach are that it wastes valuable time, is incredibly frustrating for those who do have expertise, burns out key players and consultants, and results in stagnation or watered-down plans of action.

A typical pacifying tactic is to ask for advice but already be committed to a particular course of action. This is unwise, because people soon realize that their opinions will count for nothing. A better approach is to carve out a limited area in which advice and opinions are requested.

All other types and levels of decision-making should be reserved for the nonprofit executive in charge, and not open to a vote by the board, or this or that committee.

If the executive has been well-chosen for the job, his or her decisions will be generally sound. And if they are not, the nonprofit surely has sufficient checks and balances in place that allow for a change of course -- whether simply a different decision, or a change of direction, or new leadership.

Happy Birthday, Boring!

I'm scanning the greeting card racks for the perfect message, the one that will acknowledge your growing accumulation of birthdays with a unique combination of wit, charm and quiet good taste. Instead, I see grade-school "humor" and saccharine sentiments.

So I turn to cards featuring attractive, contemporary cover artwork, only to read a stupefyingly dull message inside.

It's your day, so enjoy your cake! It's your day, so live it up! It's your day, so here's to you! It's as if the upscale card companies spend all their creative energy on professional design and let their IT people write the copy.

Maybe the problem is that a birthday is so generic (comes every year, everyone has one) that it inherently lacks personality. To mark the occasion, adults tend to do the same sort of things -- eat cake, drink (too much), get presents, feel regretful.

But greeting-card writers need to take this dreary reality and infuse it with fantasy and fun. One of the best cards I've seen lately (and sent to two people) features a grinning little boy prancing in his birthday suit on the cover. Inside, the copy reads, "Birthdays make me feel good all over!"

Stuck in Twitter's echo chamber

OK, I admit it. I've yet to join the Twitterati.

One reason is the echo-chamber effect. You know, the one that appears at the end of any popular article posted on the Web. The usual array of misspelled, angry comments is bad enough, but the tweets are inherently annoying. Who wants to read a long list of almost identical summaries of the post you just read? The effect is like watching a row of those novelty dolls that constantly nod their heads.

I guess the reader is supposed to be impressed that so many tweets have traveled the ether, to be re-tweeted ad infinitum. Maybe this show of Mass Tweetery is intended to function like a town parade. We are powerful, say the Twitterati. Look how we march in unison! Don't you want to join us?

Or maybe those repetitive website tweets are simply the waste products of tweeting — like spent bullet casings or carbon dioxide and water in aerobic respiration.

I say contemporary life is crazy enough without the ya-ya-ya-ya's of the 140-character birdcall.

Standing up for self-deprecation

It always amuses me when a cultured and accomplished English person is interviewed by the American press. Inevitably, the writer marvels at the person's self-effacing remarks. "So-and-so is incredibly modest, despite having written three world-famous plays and won the Man Booker Prize for his most recent novel," the writer burbles. "He claims it was all beginner's luck."

In fact, self-deprecation is an English trait. You are never supposed to brag about your accomplishments, and when they are mentioned, you must pretend that, really, anyone could have done the same thing.

Americans of a certain age may remember that we also were schooled to act like this. It was considered rude to "put yourself forward." Let your deeds speak for themselves, we were told. It is not necessary to remind people of your achievements.

But in today's more hard-edged social realm, the self-deprecator is liable to be taken at her word. If you smile and explain that you were able to deliver a certain lecture because you were the conference organizer's "thirty-ninth choice," your listener will frown. Obviously, you are a hopeless failure, chosen out of sheer desperation. Never mind the improbability of having thirty-eight other potential speakers turn this person down.

Surely no one likes a braggart. But the sensibility attuned to the nuance of self-deprecation appears to be as antiquated as a Henry James heroine. It seems that you now need to state your qualifications in all-caps bold, or risk being entirely misunderstood.

Hello? Paging a client.

I just e-mailed you the project you hired me to write. I even managed to finish it a few days before the deadline we set.

A day goes by, and I don't hear from you. Sure, you're probably too busy to sit down and read all the copy just now, even if you said you were desperate to get it. But couldn't you at least send me a quick "Got it, thanks" message? Because when I don't hear from you, I think, uh-oh.

As in, uh-oh, my e-mail got snagged by your ever-vigilant spam detector. Or as in, uh-oh, you're out sick or taking a vacation, and by the time you get back my e-mail will be buried under bushels of Very Important Messages from Colleagues.

So now I feel I must call you to follow up, even if you are one of those people who always lets the phone ring to voicemail unless your boss is on the line. Maybe you are one of those people who don't even listen to your voicemail. (Why do people have voicemail if they don't listen to it? Surely there's a Zen koan in there somewhere.)

Admittedly, there is more to this than the simple reassurance that my words are reaching your eyes. I've enclosed my initial invoice along with your copy, and I'm naturally keen to know that this little document is on its way to Accounts Payable.*

In larger terms, client communication is the glue that can hold a project together over the weeks and months it takes to obtain sign-offs, do user testing or deal with Legal.

Yes, yes, everyone's busy. But if a project is worth doing in the first place, it's worth putting on your calendar for regular base-touching by e-mail or conference call. Have an agenda, move briskly through it, clarify current impediments and (if necessary) reconfigure the deadlines. Keep us informed, and you keep us on your side.

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*If you've only ever had the sort of position that comes with a paycheck at regular intervals, the concept of Waiting for Payment from Clients to Pay Your Bills might seem rather alien. I once had to explain to a foot-dragging nonprofit client that the check I hadn't received was not some sort of fun extra for me but (embarrassing to have to be so dramatic) "the money I live on."