I’ve never been much of a Halloween person. I don’t like horror, I don’t like dressing up, and I don’t like strangers coming to my door.
I do like candy. I just don’t like it enough to beg for it.
Before the arrival of our daughter, my primary means of surviving Halloween was to turn off the lights and go hide in the bedroom with a good book.
How much of this is my personality and how much stems from growing up in a culture that didn’t celebrate Halloween, I don’t know.
However, I am getting an inkling of why Americans are so into it from watching the indoctrination of my daughter. It’s been all about Halloween since our nutty neighbors started decorating their front yards at the beginning of the month. Yeah. Really.
Preschool has been a little Halloween Brainwash Camp for the last few weeks, with the children bringing in their outfits for show-and-tell, making paper pumpkins, etc. ad nauseam.
Andrea absolutely loves it. Loves it.
Which means that tonight I’ll be walking around the neighborhood with her, trying to pretend to be impressed by all the little costumes and enduring the antics of massively sugar-doped children and their happy parents. At least now I understand why the parents are also so much into it.
But hey, if it’s your thing, I hope you have a good one.
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Dude. Halloween is awesome. As a child, it meant tons of free candy. As a teenager, it meant tons of fun pranks. Just ask a certain friend of ours we have in common about all the insane shit we pulled every Halloween. Like the time we had an APB out on the van we were in and actually had police looking for us. Good times. As an adult, it’s yet another excuse to hit up the bars and drink, and look at all the scantily clad young women in their naughty nurse costumes and such. Good times indeed. It really brings out the whores. I can’t wait for tonight. :)
You… Swedish curmudgeon! ;-)
The opportunity for children (and some adults) to explore at least the idea of another identity, whether it be supernatural, a superhero’s, a vocation’s or what have you, is just plain cool! This is not to mention the incredibly rare chance, in our insanely profit motivated and mutually exploiting culture, of actually simply being Given something sweet (yeah, I know the pejorative view of sugar is that it’s a drug… so what, really?) They don’t ‘beg’ for it, either, by-the-way, they absolutely expect it, and what’s more the original meaning of the phrase “trick-or-treat” is actually a good-natured threat!
OK, so have I raked your melancholic/nordic/teutonic foreign-born soul over the coals enough? Halloween, unlike the almost completely subsumed into mere raw commerce holiday of Christmas, is actually about… fun!
Note to self: The indigs get all bent out of shape if you criticize Halloween.
But I hear both of you. Guess I’m just the Scrooge of Halloween…