October 31, 2007--Take Back Halloween!
Not only is today Kathy Donovan’s birthday, it’s also Halloween. Walking from here in Greenwich Village to Balthazar in Soho for morning coffee, we passed dozens of people streaming down Broadway on their way to work who were wearing various subtle kinds of costuming: rubber spider rings, devils’ ears, cats’ noses and whiskers, spider-web stockings.
Of course later this evening the Village will be flooded with 2.0 million (you heard me) revelers in much more elaborate array. About how they will be decked out I can only speculate. Much of it will be political (there are certain to be hundreds of George Bushes and Dick Cheneys as well as many Hillarys) and much of the rest will be quite erotic (this I leave to your imagination).
But about one thing there is and will be no doubt—adults have run off and absconded with Halloween.
Not too many years ago when we first moved to the Village, the Halloween parade was called the Children’s Parade and all who marched down Fifth Avenue into Washington Square Park were children in costumes accompanied by parents in regular clothes. Now, no right-thinking parent would bring a small child out into the mayhem. Yes, there is a separate rump event for kids, but it’s a sideshow. The real action now goes on for miles up and down Sixth Avenue and it is pretty much for adults-only.
Crank back in time some more, as I am quite capable of doing since I have a few years on me, and Halloween in the city and suburbs was totally for and about children. We even made our own costumes. Tricking and Treating went on in a serious way with the emphasis on the tricks. Kids carried on on their own—parents stayed home. Some of the tricks were ashamedly rough and even violent. Since no one was interested in gathering candy treats we began setting off stink bombs on people’s doorsteps even before they could answer the doorbell.
Go on, accuse me of indulging in nostalgia. I plead guilty, but isn’t there also some sort of cultural shift reflected in adults purloining this formerly kids-only day? The first evidence of this takeover was adults attempting to turn the Trick of Treating into something benevolent—to defang it, taking all the perverse pleasure out of the soft-core wilding. They did this by pressuring kids to collect money for UNICEF rather than scrambling after Hershey’s Kisses and mini Three Musketeer bars. Then, either out of fear that their kids would be molested, poisoned, or kidnapped they began to accompany them as they made their rounds.
We live in a doorman-protected apartment house and you would think parents who live here would be comfortable tonight turning their tikes loose in the hallways. Buy no, when our doorbell rings, 100 percent of the time the children will have parents tagging along with them. Parents, by the way, frequently in costumes more elaborate than their sons’ and daughters’.
You tell me what this all means. I suspect it has something to do with adults feeling the need to escape adulthood, or their current identity, by reliving childhood—this time as they wished they had lived it back then.
Me? I’m going out tonight as Alex Rodriguez in an LA Dodgers uniform, and I’ll be collecting money for myself.
Of course later this evening the Village will be flooded with 2.0 million (you heard me) revelers in much more elaborate array. About how they will be decked out I can only speculate. Much of it will be political (there are certain to be hundreds of George Bushes and Dick Cheneys as well as many Hillarys) and much of the rest will be quite erotic (this I leave to your imagination).
But about one thing there is and will be no doubt—adults have run off and absconded with Halloween.
Not too many years ago when we first moved to the Village, the Halloween parade was called the Children’s Parade and all who marched down Fifth Avenue into Washington Square Park were children in costumes accompanied by parents in regular clothes. Now, no right-thinking parent would bring a small child out into the mayhem. Yes, there is a separate rump event for kids, but it’s a sideshow. The real action now goes on for miles up and down Sixth Avenue and it is pretty much for adults-only.
Crank back in time some more, as I am quite capable of doing since I have a few years on me, and Halloween in the city and suburbs was totally for and about children. We even made our own costumes. Tricking and Treating went on in a serious way with the emphasis on the tricks. Kids carried on on their own—parents stayed home. Some of the tricks were ashamedly rough and even violent. Since no one was interested in gathering candy treats we began setting off stink bombs on people’s doorsteps even before they could answer the doorbell.
Go on, accuse me of indulging in nostalgia. I plead guilty, but isn’t there also some sort of cultural shift reflected in adults purloining this formerly kids-only day? The first evidence of this takeover was adults attempting to turn the Trick of Treating into something benevolent—to defang it, taking all the perverse pleasure out of the soft-core wilding. They did this by pressuring kids to collect money for UNICEF rather than scrambling after Hershey’s Kisses and mini Three Musketeer bars. Then, either out of fear that their kids would be molested, poisoned, or kidnapped they began to accompany them as they made their rounds.
We live in a doorman-protected apartment house and you would think parents who live here would be comfortable tonight turning their tikes loose in the hallways. Buy no, when our doorbell rings, 100 percent of the time the children will have parents tagging along with them. Parents, by the way, frequently in costumes more elaborate than their sons’ and daughters’.
You tell me what this all means. I suspect it has something to do with adults feeling the need to escape adulthood, or their current identity, by reliving childhood—this time as they wished they had lived it back then.
Me? I’m going out tonight as Alex Rodriguez in an LA Dodgers uniform, and I’ll be collecting money for myself.
posted by Steven Zwerling at
10:25 AM
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