Halloween is the Least Halloween Moment


October 18, 2024 —
While shoving a small, toothy saw across the lips of a gaping mouth the other night, I was struck by a thought.

Well, first that thought had to force its way past the usual thought that pummels me during jack-o-lantern carving—that jack-o-lantern carving is the apex of all Halloween activities. The ultimate moment of the season. Just you and your loved ones, sharp implements, and some pumpkin victims to mutilate into monsters. The metaphor is there, the meaning is there, the activity is there, it’s all there. Halloween night, trick or treating—it’s just a final obligation at the end. I write about that idea every year here on the OTIS Halloween Season when it’s time to show off our jack-o’s.

But what I’ve never said is that I’ve always felt slightly guilty about that take.

I mean, how could I sideline trick-or-treating? How could I treat Halloween itself as just the final October day, or the final Halloween Season day? A concluding sentence instead of the thesis statement?

 

Well, this new thought that entered my own hollowed-out gourd is that maybe it’s the government’s fault. Which is a wild thought for me because “government” isn’t a word that ever bounces around my brain. Unless, like, I can’t get Subterranean Homesick Blues out of my head.

I’m not sure why I started thinking this new thought. Maybe it hit me because my daughters and I were gutting our pumpkins differently than we usually do. Normally, we hit a farm, choose our pumpkins from the mound of orange boils, head home to the living room—which is the most Halloween-decorated room in the house—and carve them on the floor while watching a spooky movie.

This time, we just nabbed them from the grocery store and carved them at the dining room table. The first part of that is because it was six bucks per pumpkin at the grocery store, which means we bought four large pumpkins for the price of one or two at the farm. Also, my local grocery store is ten miles from my local farmstand, so it’s probably the same pumpkins.

As to the dining room table, that’s because that room is now my Salem Room—painted orange with black trim, green curtains, black tablecloths, and decorated with Witch City artifacts and photos from my sojourns there. Also, instead of a spooky movie, we played our personally curated Halloween playlist on the Google Home.

It was, it turned out, the better way to do it. Everyone was way more engaged because there was no movie to watch and we were all facing each other. Or maybe it was just because of the orange room, it felt like we were carving jack-o-lanterns inside of a jack-o-lantern.

Anyway, as I sat there giving my pumpkin gruesome, violent life and pretending that the three dearest to me didn’t have edged weapons in their hands, I realized that Halloween itself couldn’t beat this moment because we didn’t let it.

See, let me describe the typical Halloween, at least when it falls on a weekday which is the majority of the time: Everyone goes to work and school, from which we all rush home and throw on costumes for a two-hour trick-or-treat window, and then it’s over and maybe we try to watch one more horror movie, but we can feel November 1 and Santa Claus pressing against our windows and that dude is hard to ignore.

 

Christmas, on the other hand, most have off. Many even get Christmas Eve off. Either way, we set aside a space to really dig into the holiday—bake cookies, watch specials, open presents, listen to Bing Crosby, watch the skies for snow, and generally be bored enough in between to enjoy the day.

October 31 is just not a day set up to dig into the holiday. It should be the day we gut pumpkins and watch horror movies and listen to Thriller and languish in the spooky with enough time in between to get bored and be in the moment. Trick-or-treat should just be part of the itinerary, like opening up presents on Christmas.

So until we fix this calendar oversight and make Halloween a national holiday, I’ll say it again, like I say every year: The climax of Halloween is whenever you set down with the ones you love and make monster-lanterns out of fruit-vegetables. And we did that last night.

...I'm on the pavement...Thinkin' 'bout the government...