Halloween has always struck me as a rather peculiar holiday.
It’s a holiday in which parents dress their kids up to resemble vicious blood-sucking creatures and other souls that have long kicked their air addiction, splatting their faces with fake blood and fangs as they tell Johnny to stop hitting Suzy with his plastic battle axe. Meanwhile, other parents will dress their girls up in bright pink princess dresses evincing the epitome of grace and gentility, while the boys get Army cams with black and green face paint and a toy AK-47 so they can reenact Dad’s favorite scenes from “Red Dawn.”
The parents then walk the kids around the neighborhood and, regardless of their religious persuasion, they will avoid the houses that appear the most safe, and boring, in favor of the scariest possible, complete with gruesome monsters, cobwebs clouding the front porch and spooky music booming through speakers. They knock on the door, then give the owner – who may or may not answer with a chainsaw in hand – one of two options, trick or treat, fully expecting them to choose the latter.
The mission, which the kids always choose to accept, is to consume as much candy as possible before tooth decay takes hold.
The next day, however, Johnny will reenter a world where suddenly it’s not okay to scare the living daylights out of his sister, candy is reserved only for special occasions, nothing is for free and a SWAT team is called to his school if he happens to point his index finger at another student, because it’s apparently “too violent.”
It’s the sort of surreal scene Lewis Carroll might have originally put in “Alice in Wonderland” before removing it in the event someone of political importance thought him worthy of the loony bin, replacing it with the mad tea party scene in which Alice is told there’s no more room at a huge table with an empty armchair sitting right in front of her.
Don’t get me wrong. As a kid, I loved getting the free candy, but the whole thing was confusing. Being moderately rational, I couldn’t understand why one day I’m told to avoid scary looking strangers who offer me candy, yet on Halloween I was supposed to be eager to knock on the door to a house that looked like it’s occupied by Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolf Man and the IRS and ask them for a Three Musketeers bar.
But what I really, really don’t get is how the same day Martin Luther nailed his Ninety Five Theses to a church door is now used by full grown adults as an occasion to celebrate their arrested development. I go to Value Village and Goodwill and see a ratio of 10-to-one adult costumes versus kids. What gives? And half the costumes seem more appropriate for a Lover’s Package store.
Lucy van Pelt of Peanuts fame said that a person should always choose a costume which is in direct contrast to their own personality. If that’s the case, we’re a nation of celibate Amish. Then again, Lucy did proceed to put on a witch mask after saying that.
Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole trick or treat aspect of it was conceived by the American Dental Association in order to maintain its powerful monopoly. Call me a 10/31 Truther. Just how many kids do you see dressed up as dentists when you answer your door on Halloween?
Or maybe I should stop trying to make sense of Halloween and just enjoy it for the mad tea party it is.
TJ Martinell is a reporter with the Kirkland Reporter.
