The Homogenization of Halloween

One of the more interesting questions you can ask someone is "What was your favorite Halloween costumes as a kid?". You usually get a wide variety of answers, and they often look to the side and get a half smile on their face as some memories come rushing back.

yoda picFor me, as a child of the 80s, it was my Yoda costume way back when. We actually got to wear our costumes to school one day and, at the time, it was about as cool as cool can get.

This isn't to say it was something really special; marketing was working overtime on these, and essentially they were selling a green trash bag with a plastic mask and a string that would snap around the back of your head. But at the time, it was gold.

Thank god children don't have fully developed sweat glands at that age, or you would have been greeted by more than the smell of molded plastic and early-onset Type-II diabetes when people opened the door for groups of kids holding out their pillow cases for loot.

Children this year have their own version to an extent, I've heard out of the $3.5-ish billion spent on Halloween this year, the hottest selling costume among boys is Spider-Man. That's cool, as well, Spider-Man is cool. Little girls, as usual, get shafted.

The real difference between when I was a kid are:

  • Instead of spending $2 on a costume, you're talking $10-$30 easy.
  • Way too many kids will be trick-or-treating at 4pm instead of 7pm, and way too many of them will be doing it in "safe zones", such as malls, schools, and other places. I wish I was making this up.

The first point is a problem and not a problem... we're talking supply and demand here, and as Halloween has gotten "bigger" people have stepped in to offer what people want. And once you reach a certain age, if the kid next to you has a rubber mask and you have a plastic mask, well damnit, you want rubber too. Licensing and intellectual property rights play a big role, too.

But not below a certain age, and that's honestly quite annoying. A 'Capser' costume for a kid who is four years old is fine if it's circa-1983 costume technology: the kid looks adorable for adults, and the kid has no idea their price of their costume was interchangeable with a Big Mac.

The other part is a little more systemic, and as a whole is probably attributable to the soccer moms and politician's continual obsession with 'making things safe'. You know, for the kids. This isn't something you can really politicize either, as both sides are equally guilty. Seriously: don't even try. They just are.

Ergo, the sanitization and homogenization of Halloween. Usually this is the part where you have to be careful about the rose-colored glasses of childhood, but I don't really think it's the case, simply because there were real changes happening while I was growing up. There were a few big things I can remember:

  • There suddenly being this big fear, because of some incident somewhere, that psychopaths were going to put things in kid's candy. Pins, razor blades, tacks, whatever. Either way, you ended up at Med Point having your candy X-Rayed. That's kinda uncool.
  • The demonization of Halloween seemed to catch full force with the demonization of the paper and dice game, "Dungeons and Dragons". Not that I ever really played, but lord, this thing was the equivalent of the game 'Grand Theft Auto' in it's day. Basically, some form of direct way of letting Satan whisper into your children's soul.
  • I don't know quite what happened, but there was this sudden fear that everyone who came before was mildy insane for letting their kids be out in the dark. Trick-or-treating started getting pushed back a half hour, then an hour, until now in most places you're lucky if it's dusk when trick-or-treating hours are wrapping up.

The problem is that there are dark spots in life, and no matter how good we get at homogenizing our environment. And Halloween teaches kids how to deal.

Halloween can be mildly traumatic for a kid out trick-or-treating. The world takes on shadows and interrmitten yells as people answer doors, and every pool of shadows between the street lights and houses could hold older teenagers just waiting to snatch your hard-earned bag of loot, let alone whatever else your mind can imagine that age from stories.

But you had to brave those pools of shadows if you want that loot, and had to approach the dimly-lit houses of strangers hoping beyond hope that this is the house ready to give it up for the night, and they'll just say "Go ahead and take what you want from the bowl.". Sometimes you got nickels, sometimes you got Apples, and sometimes you got last year's leftover candy recycled.

Sometimes, just sometimes, you happened upon that rarest of houses: the ones who gave away the King-sized candy bars. Many a kid went out into Halloween with a nervous buzz in their stomach, primarily because they were getting a real taste of their eventual life outside their parents: fear, anticipation, disappointment, risk, and reward.

In life, sometimes you get nickels, sometimes you get Apples, sometimes you get last year's recycled candy. And sometimes, just sometimes, you get the King-sized candy bar... but you have to be willing to brave the shadowy areas in between the pools of light.

Trick-or-treating at a brightly-lit mall at 4pm just isn't quite the same.

yummy alcohol posted button Posted by drunkenbatman
    October 31, 2004, at 10:25 PM


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