Halloween and Stolen Childhoods

Halloween used to be a children’s holiday.  In an Eisenhower-era America Halloween was a chance for children (usually about 10 and under) to dress in silly costumes, parade the neighborhood for candy and defy our fears by making fun of ghosts, goblins and other ghoulies.  Mom would put a paper sack over our heads, cut out some precarious eye holes (probably the scariest part of the whole evening).  She would dress us warm, throw us out the door and tell us to stay together.  That was it.  We would come home an hour later, cold but with a city block’s worth of treats in our sacks.

The worst thing that could happen was forgetting at which house the Jehovah’s Witnesses lived.  [The small white stucco at the top of a steep set of overgrown stairs on the hilly side of the block.]  That place was always a disappointment.  You went up the hill and only got a copy of the Watchtower for your trouble.   The best place to go was the resident home of the nuns of St. Anthony’s church.  They always had home made caramel apples.   As a protestant, it also gave me a chance to see one of these mystical creatures up close, along with the beautiful statue of St. Anthony that decorated the foyer.

In a way, Halloween started the season of fun.  We knew that on the heels of Halloween came Thanksgiving and then Christmas.  I loved Halloween; now I would be just as happy to see it removed from public observance.

We have stolen Halloween from our children.  For that matter, the loss of this holiday as a light-hearted, playful treat is symptomatic of society’s theft of our children’s childhood in general.  We should be ashamed.

            The name, “Halloween” first appears around 1750.  The day it denotes, however, is ancient, perhaps being co-opted by Christians from pagan ceremonies of the Celtic holiday of Samhain (one of four seasonal divisions of the year, marking the end of harvest and the beginning of winter).  All Hallow’s Eve was the vigil prior to the celebration of All Saints day, a day to honor, contemplate and commune with the saints, martyrs and the dearly departed.  The day has had many variations in how it is presented, most of them cosmetic but all surrounding a religious expression of human/spirit interaction.  Over time, Halloween has been neutralized to remove the superstition, and accentuate a rational way to deal with fear by laughing at it, that is until the, “Me” generation started mucking up the works. 

Now we want the holiday to be an adult party.  We want the cute, fear cancelling costumes to be replaced with blood and guts.  We want horror.  We want fear.  We want that legal drug of adrenaline to surge through us.  If the kids get left behind in all of this, so be it.  Kids are a drag on all the fun parents are supposed to be having, right?  The world owes us parents unending indulgence, right?  We don’t have any responsibilities to anything but instant self-gratification, right?  Wrong, wrong, and way wrong.

I would really like the world of horror to be treated like flatulence.  We recognize that it will always be there in one degree or another, but it should be diminished, segregated and frowned on as socially unacceptable.  If exposure to love, goodness and morality are important in raising a child, what does violence, anger and hate do for them?

Protect our children and keep the faith.