Halloween differently, but the same.
For the past week, I’ve been trying to find a quotation I love and have had no luck. I can’t remember which of my favorite authors penned it. Roald Dahl? Ray Bradbury? Dr. Seuss? Someone else I’m not thinking of?
To paraphrase it with a butcher knife, the quote basically said that it’s ok to scare children, so long as you also make them laugh. The quote screams Halloween.
It seems Halloween has grown up. So many sexy this and sexy that costumes. You’d think it a sad thing, but I think the holiday can exist on many levels. Just like how we as people live on many different levels. And so I think more it’s just us who grow up.
When we’re young, Halloween was exciting. We’re prone to hero worship when we’re young. Halloween feeds that hunger well. We can paint a large “S” on a red towel, tie it around our necks and take to the imaginative skies.
When we’re even younger, maybe our parents dressed us in some generic pirate costume, bought at the store or fashioned together with things already in your house. I was an Indian once early on. I didn’t care about Indians, but it didn’t matter. I was part of the fun. My mother also once dressed me as… a construction worker?
Yeah, buddy! Sharpie mustache and all!
When we were young, everything was new. Bursting with promise and fear mixed in equal and unquantifiable amounts. Halloween was new and scary and WHY IS THAT MAN’S FACE FALLING OFF?!
Oh…makeup. Whew.
But never again will you feel this way for most things, though. You’ve seen them before. Like those teenagers in costume who opened the front door for this young trick-or-treater. Once they were the mysterious adultish I was just starting to want to be, in a world of mature Halloween parties I wanted to be at one day. They’re now just those kids in the further back memories that came to mirror my own memories going to these parties when I was in high school and college.
By the way, I was dressed that night as “someone waiting on the other line”. I had no costume. I found an old push-button phone in my closet and put the receiver on my shoulder, carrying the phone.
Man was I clever.
Halloween is different, though.
When I have kids of my own, I’ll hopefully get to see the world through their eyes. As they stare long and confused at someone dressed as a slutty zombie Miley Cyrus. (can that please be a thing?) As they plunge their tiny hands into a pumpkin bucket full of candy. Will the future have pumpkin buckets? God, I hope so. Anyway, I see it already in other children. And it sinks me deep into great memories.
Most of all, I’d love to see them alternately race and crawl through life as I did at their age. Staring at trick-or-treaters as they walk by. wide eyed and terrified. Wondering what their future will be like when they’re almost too old to trick-or-treat and older teens open the door for them at a Halloween party. And when eventually they appreciate Halloween as I do now: as one of those few windows back into our childhood. When we were innocent, and the world toyed with that innocence.