All Hallow's Eve(ntually You Have to Admit That Was Ridiculous)

It’s October 31st. Let’s say the year is 1992 (because I’m not trying to be factually accurate, just set a scene). There are apples bobbing in bathtubs, pumpkins glowing on stoops, leaves crunching under boots and bike tires, and pillowcases, divested of their typical stuffing, waiting to be glutted with candy bars.

I’m sure you were all there, bit parts or lead roles in the Halloween scene that played out across every neighborhood in America two decades ago. Maybe you were Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz. Or Egon from Ghostbusters. If your mom was less creative or your family hard up for cash, you might have been just a garden variety vampire or cowboy or scarecrow. 

It didn’t matter though, did it? Everyone got the same amount of attention and candy, because that’s what Halloween was all about. It was about kids. It was about spooky decorations and drinking cider and carving pumpkins and eating more candy than you actually wanted, just because you could.

I’m guessing, with an intro like that, you think this post is going to be about how we’ve lost the true meaning of Halloween. Maybe I’ll talk about the slutty costumes or the way we can’t make candy apples for the neighbor kids anymore because of that razor blade scare a hundred years ago. 

WRONG.

I’m staying in 1992, guys, because what I really want to talk about is how crazy my parents were about Halloween! And I don't mean crazy about it as in they loved it—although for two people who actually met at a Halloween party, you might think that'd be the case. 

But no. I mean crazy about it as in they thought the actual devil (with a capital D?) might come knocking on their door, game to trade tricks for treats. And by treats, I mean the souls of their innocent children, because whatever could be tastier to Satan than the spirit of youth? 

Now, I loved them then and I loved them now; but I think with over two decades between then and now, I can safely laugh at them for their anti-Halloween fanaticism.

To be fair, their fanaticism didn’t extend to giving out toothbrushes instead of candy—which is pretty impressive, considering my dad is a dentist. It also didn’t stop him from wearing his handcrafted set of hideous fake teeth to answer the door for each trick-or-treater. He still does it today, although I imagine it lost some of its horror when they moved to Cañon City, a town where meth mouth has kept him in business decades after his supposed retirement.

We also carved pumpkins and ate candy. We played in the leaves. Well, we raked the leaves. For hours and hours every weekend throughout the fall. Sometimes Jesse and I could rake in the same corner of the yard and we called that playing. Heck, we even drank cider at the Louisburg Cider Mill, where they sold Halloween-themed treats that my brother found irresistible.   

Maybe that's where my parents' Halloween fear came from. What good could possibly come of a holiday that seduced their two-year-old boy to smuggle a skull-shaped sucker out the door and into the car? He was never a thief before Halloween!

But we really don't have to do any sleuthing on the topic of their fear. It's like this: I grew up in the heart of the Bible belt. Think Jesus Camp, then think Kimberly went there. No, really. At the impressionable age of 7, I was encouraged to speak in tongues along with my fellow campers. Now I liked ghosts as much as the next girl, even with the moratorium on Halloween at my house; but something seemed fishy about inviting the holy ghost into a room of prepubescents. You don't need a fourth grade education to know you shouldn't give that kind of power to children.

So yeah. Based at least in part on the simple geographic location of the place they called home, my parents were on the HallowEvil bandwagon. And just like those after them would condemn Harry Potter, they did what Dr. Dobson told them to do and banned Halloween from our home. Kind of. Mostly they just didn't let us trick-or-treat. But the point is, they did what they thought was right. They did what they thought they had to do to protect us from the ugly things in the world.

Who can blame them? Most days I want to lock my daughter in her closet, just to be on the safe side. There are a lot of creepy people out there. There's a lot of hate. There's plenty of real danger. Show me a parent who doesn't want to protect her child from the world and I'll show you a real heartless jerk.

But here's the thing.

Even if Halloween really was the devil's day. Even if someone somewhere was sacrificing his cat to Satan. Even if there was a time in history when a group of people celebrated the day in an unsavory manner. Even if. None of that has anything to do with costumed kids mooching candy off their neighbors. It just doesn't.

The truth is, if my parents hadn't introduced me to the idea that there was evil in the world, I'd have thought about it a lot less as a kid. If they hadn't filled my head with images of the devil and unseen forces at work in the world—images I had plenty of imagination to make very real—my bedroom after dark would've been a lot less creepy of a place.

So what's the point of all telling you all this? Mostly I just wanted to gripe about not getting to ride the Halloween trailer—the awesomely decorated tractor and flatbed that took all the kids from my neighborhood trick-or-treating. That still burns my butt. 

But really, I want to remind all us parents (myself included) that it's easy to get wacky when it comes to protecting our kids. Really easy. Let's not paralyze our children with our own fears. It's their right to be young and innocent, and we would be furious with anyone who took that right from them. Let's not be the objects of our own fury.

And seriously. If there are still pockets of the world where Halloween has been demonized and you're living in one of them, don't be a headless horseman's ass. Let your kids be kids. Because if you don't, they might come back years later and write a blog post about you. And that's scary.