October 31, 2014--Best of Behind: Take Back Halloween

This is a reprise of my first Halloween posting from back in 2007. It's rough around the rhetorical edges but, I think, still pertinent--

Not too many years ago when we first moved to Greenwich 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 current 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 raunchy affair.

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 (see below). 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 set off stink bombs on people’s doorsteps even before they could answer the doorbell.

Accuse me of indulging in nostalgia, 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 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 Musketeers 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 now 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. But 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, like A-Rod, I’ll be collecting money for myself.