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?
