I awoke to a foggy, overcast morning - perfect for the thrills and chills of the holiday. The candy is stocked, the decorations are up, the lights are ready. Now, I just wait for darkness to descend and for the little ghouls and goblins (and Barbies) to appear at the door and demand their due with the best holiday phrase ever: TRICK OR TREAT!
I hope you have a wickedly wonderful Halloween!
In my quest to find particular Halloween items, I sometimes wander into some sad and desperate places. None has ever been as sad and desperate as my recent visit to Walmart.
I haven’t been into a Walmart store in 20-30 years. I hate the place. It feels like the apocalypse has come and gone leaving piles of detritus behind for the last few humans to fight over. I once had the misfortune of working for a company who relied on sales to Walmart. I got to witness firsthand the arrogance and condescension of Walmart buyers who knew they held people’s livelihoods in their talons. They would insist on purchases that the company lost money on in order to ensure other purchases. This was before Amazon had gripped America, so Walmart wielded a mighty fist. I imagine things are similar (or worse) when dealing with Amazon today.
I had read online that Walmart had those Empire blow mold trick or treat pails shaped like jack o’ lanterns. You know the ones. They used to be for sale everywhere for 99 cents during every Halloween season, but these days, they’re hard to come by. I wanted a couple of them for a project, so I actually looked up the closest Walmart and made a special trip there this week. I sincerely wish I hadn’t.
The outside of the store was nice enough. It really didn’t betray the evil lurking inside. The parking lot was a total mess, but that’s to be expected in the area where the store is. However, once I got through those doors, my personal hell began.
I won’t go through every detail, but I will say that I felt dirty immediately. Maybe it was the sky high stacks of garbage products that made me feel like I was on the trench run in Star Wars. Maybe it was how the employees seemed to cower like they’d been recently whipped. Maybe it was the way i was eyed suspiciously by fellow customers who couldn’t be bothered to wear underwear. By the time I reached the Halloween merch, I was itching to leave.
Sadly, I never saw the product I’d ventured into that hellscape for. To be honest, it might have been there. I just couldn’t be bothered to go up and down every aisle in search of it. I found myself eager to leave, so leave I did.
On the way out, I set off the store’s security alarm. I didn’t miss a beat and kept right on walking. I felt a lot like a prisoner who’d found the gap in the fence. No way was I hanging around any longer than I had to.
I sincerely felt relief once I was back in my car. I decided then and there that I’d mastered the Walmart Escape Room for the last time and I vowed never to return. At least not until Walmart decides to sell more Halloween blow molds.
Halloween is more a tradition than it is an actual holiday. According to the National Retail Federation, 69% of Americans celebrated Halloween in 2022. Great, but it’s never a day where anyone gets a day off from school or work. Why not? Why do Thanksgiving, Yule, and countless other three-day weekend holidays get the day off treatment and Halloween does not?
Some claim it’s due to Halloween’s origins in folklore and superstition. Others would claim that it’s because it was an unwanted celebration to begin with in this country because it was celebrated by rampaging thugs - child thugs but still thugs. But I think it has the most to do with the Christian religion’s grip on those who rule our nation. The money doesn’t say “In God We Trust” for nothing.
Halloween is one of those traditions that the Catholic church has tried to stamp out time and time again. Like other pagan holidays, they tried to co-opt it into their own calendar. Samhain was renamed as All Hallows Eve in much the same way that the church usurped Yule. It didn’t change the underlying feelings and the outward celebrations very much, though. Those who had celebrated before continued their celebrations in much the same way.
All Saints Day never really became a very big deal in American culture in the way that Christmas did. Christmas was twisted into service of the capitalist moneymaking agenda, so it rose to the top. All Saints Day became a somewhat forgotten holiday that only a few in the Catholic faith even bothered to take note of. It makes sense that they’d resent the fact that the dark mythos of Samhain continued to reign supreme in American culture.
In the 1980s, many churches began waging war on Halloween. They claimed that it was all about devil worship in the same breath that decried heavy metal music, music videos and horror movies. If anything, that refusal to accept the holiday actually made it more popular.
I’m actually glad that Halloween isn’t a federal holiday. I think it should remain a subversive celebration that undermines the very roots of our society and allows us to embrace the very things that we fear, if only for one night each year.
It’s never been my goal to turn this into a blog about shopping. So, when everyone is promoting the new Loungefly Happymeal bags, I’m thinking about bigger questions. The main one is “Why do these products exist?” The answer is clearly nostalgia, but it got me thinking more about the nature of nostalgia and the waves in which it comes.
I’ll be honest - I just don’t care about McDonalds. I have a couple of fond memories of going there as a child but nothing major, and by the time I could make my own food choices, McD’s was off my list. I know for sure that I haven’t set foot in one of their restaurants since 1992 when I began eating a vegetarian diet.
For some, however, the era of the Happy Meal was a huge part of their childhood. When you map the Venn diagram of 80s kids and Halloween lovers, those in the overlap are huge fans of the Halloween McNuggets figures and the plastic Halloween pails that housed Happy Meals in 1986.
I find it fascinating that people outside the 80s kid group may not care at all about something that looms so large for others. It all has to do with the impressions made at certain ages AND the age at which those kids can afford trinkets like these. Let’s face it - $70 bags like the ones from Loungefly are out of reach for many. That’s why items like this only appear when the nostalgia class of 1986 has matured to the point where they have more expendable income. And these items will completely disappear when the next generation of spenders matures…and on and on it goes.
Halloween decorations have almost always been disposable to a certain degree. I think about all those glorious tissue honeycomb and embossed cardboard products that Beistle brought to market starting in the early 1900s. Most of them didn’t even last one season without damage of some sort. That’s why very few Halloween items transcend nostalgia and get labeled as classics.
Each era has its own batch of Halloween decor, and that’s okay by me. It’s just another reason why Halloween continues to thrive without any national recognition as a holiday. We get to keep reinventing it for ourselves and those who follow.
If you love Halloween, you have to love bats! They really are very helpful animals, ridding us of lots of pesky insects every day. When I lived in Memphis, I would often sit out by a friend’s pool at night and watch the bats swoop down to snatch mosquitoes out of midair.
There are over 1,400 species of bats worldwide, and Bat World is looking to help every, single one of them. From the Bat World web site:
Bat World Sanctuary is on the front line to end the mistreatment of bats. Each year we rescue hundreds of bats who might otherwise die. Lifetime sanctuary is given to non-releasable bats, including those that are orphaned, injured, and rescued from the exotic pet trade, zoos and research facilities.
You can learn more and maybe even make a donation at https://batworld.org/.
Many years ago, I became interested in creating animated shorts using Flash. I created several different properties and tried to get them “out there” but nothing really stuck. This was before it was super easy to upload things to YouTube, so viewers had to visit my site to see the Flash animations. It was doomed for failure, but it was fun and I learned a lot.
During this time, I wrote a children’s book called Little Robert Goes to Camp. I wrote and illustrated a story about a child version of Robert Smith who went to summer camp. It was a basic fish out of water tale wrapped in gothy goodness. I had a lot of fun making it so I decided to turn it into a video.
I turned each illustration into a shot and recorded a British narrator voice who basically read the written text and did character voices. I thought it turned out well, but I’ve often regretted not doing more with the idea. I mean, Little Robert was a great character. I just didn’t want to get sued by the man himself. I thought about renaming him, but “Robert” felt too right to change it.
I suppose I should just let Little Robert rest in peace, but I still consider ways that I could do more with him. Maybe one day. Here’s one page that shows LR with his best friend, Dracula.
image by Jon Russo, published in the Montclair Times on 10-24-19
The week after Halloween is always difficult. It was especially difficult this year because of the dismal trick or treater turnout I had. Let’s just say I have enough Sour Patch Kids to last me a while. Putting away the decorations was a dismal chore this year. It felt thankless despite the fact that I know people in my neighborhood enjoyed seeing them. Some even told me so. Still, it was difficult, and the capitalist world’s obsession with Xmas made it even harder.
I hardly ever watch broadcast television. About the only things I watch live are football games, so this past weekend was particularly nasty with all the Xmas commercials being crammed down my throat. It’s just too much contrast to flip a switch and go from autumnal settings with ghosts and witches to winter scenes with snowmen and Santas. Yikes! I like the Yuletide season just fine, but I need a buffer. WAIT, we already have one! It’s called Thanksgiving!
Why can’t Americans let Thanksgiving occupy November? Because Thanksgiving doesn’t generate a lot of wealth. Those who profit on the season of greed do so as soon as they feel like they can. Halloween has been the starter’s pistol that begins the race for most, but this year I even saw some Xmas ads BEFORE Halloween. They were so completely out of place as to have the opposite of their intended effect. They make me hate Xmas.
My solution? We’ve got to amp up Thanksgiving, of course! We need new traditions. Here are a few ideas to get you started:
Robot Turkey Battle Royale - culminating in a national championship with big prizes
Super Turkey Lotto - enough said
Hunt the Hunter - people dressed as turkeys hunt down vicious turkey hunters
Thanksgiving Songs - No Mariah - maybe EDM/rock crossovers instead
Sexy Thanksgiving Time - make T-day the autumn Valentine’s day by replacing family with romance
Now it’s your turn. Let’s ramp up this Turkey of a holiday and make it something the commercial world can get behind!
I work from home these days, so I envy people who have a work or school community to share Halloween with. When I was in high school, I was too terrified to let people know who I really was to dress up on the annual “Goofy Goblin” day. I have no idea why they called it that. Maybe some bible-thumpers were trying to push Halloween out of the public schools. At any rate, I didn’t participate, but I enjoyed being on the periphery of the madness.
So here I am on the periphery in a new way as the only one on my block with big decorations outside. The candy is ready, in a bowl by the front door, the decorations are up, the cats are out of harm’s way, and the magic of Halloween night awaits.
I hope you and yours have the most wondrously frightening time tonight. It’s come upon me too quickly this year. I’ve hardly had time to enjoy it. Let’s all remember to fully experience it for one more day before it passes us by once again. Happy Halloween!
Holidays are tricky things. They’re mostly political. They’re either designed to aggrandize the top 1% or to placate an under-recognized subset of society. Lots of holidays began as religious celebrations (for the record, those fall under the “aggrandizing the top 1%” category) or were folky fun that was co-opted by a major religion to push their agenda on the celebrants. But, either way, the holidays that have stuck around are the ones that have become what we needed them to be when we needed them to be that. Very few continue to celebrate blacksmiths on Old Clem’s Night because the only blacksmiths left are those blacksmithing hipsters I took a class from once. A holiday has to grow and change with the times in order to continue to be celebrated.
Halloween has stuck around because it’s one of the most flexible holidays every created. In fact, it might just be THE most flexible of all our fun days. It’s mutated so many times over the centuries that today’s version would be unrecognizable to the celebrants of Samhain. It can be pretty much whatever you want it to be these days. While there are still some conventions for how to celebrate it, most of those are highly malleable.
I think flexibility is one of the things that first attracted me to the holiday when I was a kid. Yes, there was the gothy goodness, but there was also freedom. You see, Halloween used to be a holiday that kids never spent with their parents. Parents could ruin most things, even Christmas, but they hardly ever wanted anything to do with Halloween. When I was growing up, it was sort of an underground holiday for kids. The banks were open and the mail still got delivered. I went out with zero parental supervision as soon as the street light on the corner popped on, and I spent the evening canvassing the neighborhood with friends until I had as much candy as I could carry.
One year, my brother and I foolishly decided we’d build a haunted house in our home’s unfinished basement. It was a fool’s errand because there wasn’t enough room and our path was going to force visitors to crouch to get under furnace ducts, but we went so far as to dig a shallow grave that I bet is still under that house to this day. Doesn’t that sound like FUN?
When I got older, I started coming up with things I could do to enjoy handing out candy at the front door. I remember one year making a Star Wars scene that was more fun to create than it was to witness. That year, my mom told me that the scene couldn’t encroach on her kitchen as she closed the door and let me have at it. That was the spirit of Halloween to me - freedom to have fun with very little interference from adults.
These days, parents are terrified to allow their children out at night on their own. I get it. The world is as messy as ever. And yet, risk is inherent in anything worth doing. I feel strongly that children should learn that lesson and accept it as an axiom in their lives. I’m not saying kids should risk their lives for Halloween candy, but most children out trick or treating are perfectly safe, especially if they’re part of a group. There have never been any real mass candy poisonings or the other big fears that the news media trots out every October just so they can fill screens with hyperbole.
The big question is what kind of change do we want future Halloweens to embrace. Do we want our children to face their fears or luxuriate within their safe zones? It may seem that I’m resistant to the freedom I just spent some paragraphs celebrating. That’s not really the point I’m trying to make, though. I know the holiday has to change. I’d just prefer it if that change still allowed a taste of freedom for our offspring.
A lot of modern children have never really trick or treated. Instead, some attend those cloying things that involve people dressing up and giving out candy from the trunks of cars in a parking lot. These events are telling children that the only people worthy of your trust are the handful of people who agree with your faith and who you already know. The fact is, a huge percentage of the crimes committed against children were committed by trusted members of the clergy, so you can STFU about churchgoers being safer in any way, shape or form.
The fact is that going trunk to trunk is really no different than going house to house except for the fact that the fear of the parents is now a factor. This is a microcosm of the extremist mess that has fueled the current state of catastrophe in the governance and civility of these United States. It’s all driven by fear. But it isn’t fear of ghosts, ghouls, and goblins. It’s fear of the people we don’t know. The people who we think don’t look like us or think like us.
Isn’t it time we recognized that racial categorization is a lie? Isn’t it time that we recognized all that we share with those we’re on this planet with? Isn’t it time we realized that we all sink or swim together?
In 100 years, will we all be so confined to like-minded groups that Halloween will be about fearing those who are different from our insular group of choice? That saddens and upsets me. Will liberal families have orange and black decorations with the Trump monster on them? While I agree that there isn’t much that would be scarier, that isn’t the point.
The point is that the artificial divides between us are giving us fears that are no longer fun. Halloween should be about facing our fears and learning that there was really nothing to be afraid of all along. It’s a life lesson that can teach children how to become entrepreneurs and leaders in the world. It can also teach them that different isn’t scary at all.
Which future Halloween do you want for your kids?
