Halloween. That ancient evening which comes once in a calendar year filled with frightening ghouls, monsters, witches, and enough sugar to rot the teeth out of the head of a hippopotamus. Children look forward to this night of dressing up and going door to door in the hunt for endless candy and chocolate while parents worry about potential cavities and more pressing safety concerns. Halloween, whose rich roots date back to pagan Britain and Ireland (where, following the Christianization of these lands, became All Hallow’s or All Saint’s Eve) has been immortalized in popular culture almost as much as Christmas. Back when I was a kid (we’re talking the 1980s here) one could always count on getting a good fright by watching the Halloween flicks or cheaper – made, direct – to video knockoffs. For several decades now, bored, daring teenagers have strived to make this classic night of evil and darkness a bit more exciting by engaging in relatively harmless pranks such as soaping the windows of the local store or wrapping toilet paper around a neighbor’s trees to reckless and dangerous acts of vandalism such as burning down abandoned houses or violent crimes including bank robberies ( Keep in mind that since this is the only night of the year that over 90 percent of the population is walking around wearing a mask, it’s next to impossible for police to check who is legitimate and who is up to no good). But while Halloween always promises to be a fun – filled few hours for little ones with creative imaginations, looking at this annual celebration through my 42-year-old eyes, I can’t help but think that this historic celebration of spooks is slightly overrated. For starters, as with its cousins Christmas and Easter, Halloween has become way too commercialized – and I’m not simply referring to all those horror flicks that have hit our screens over the past several decades, most of which are more on the campy side than genuinely scary. In the weeks leading up to Halloween, the average consumer is assailed with a barrage of adverts warning that they’d better buy this or that product or else. Furthermore, while we all – regardless of age – just love consuming helping portions of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Snickers bars and homemade candy apples, having people knocking on your door every few minutes can be a trifle annoying, especially if you’ve had a long, arduous day at the office. Kids’ costumes can be wickedly (pardon the pun) expensive, and besides, is it really a good idea to allow children to consume that much sugar before going to bed and not expect them to be climbing the walls? Since entering the ranks of adulthood, most Halloweens for me have been a relatively benign affair generally limited to handing out candy and chips to trick-or-treaters. Deciding to step out of the ordinary, this year I volunteered to operate the fog machine for a group of friends who put on a haunted forest in a local campground. After spending two hours in the freezing cold making the entrance to this evil forest a touch more scary and atmospheric, I walked back to see how my friends were getting along. Seeing Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, the Texas Chainsaw killer, and a handful of witches together in a dark forest underneath a harvest moon, I just couldn’t overcome the feelings of nostalgia. I suppose the kid in all of us still loves Halloween.
