Just a few days until Halloween

 It’s only a few days before Halloween, and as I contemplate what the season means to me, I’m glad I grew up with friends and family that were big about celebrating Halloween. Carved pumpkins every year, trick-or-treating, then sorting the candy at home - depending on how cold it had been that year, probably with hot chocolate and maybe some late night horror movies. Even when I was 16 and my best friend and I swore we were too old to trick-or-treat and spent the night passing out candy, we couldn’t help grabbing some pillow cases and doing a quick run around the neighborhood afterward. It wasn’t a lot - but we DID get candy… and so did her brother who, in a fit of trying to be mature, had also sworn off Halloween that year.

I always felt bad for my friends at school who had to stay home that night. Their families, typically for religious reasons, kept them home. For them - or at least their parents - this was a time to hide inside with the lights off on the front porch to discourage trick-or-treaters. They didn’t even pass out candy. They were told it was a time of devil worship, that people ran rampant in the streets with demons, and that someone would poison them or hurt them. I remember a kid telling me that his mom had taught him that by dressing up in a scary costume, he'd be inviting demons to posses him. I don't know if that was true or not, but I know lots of families view Halloween with a wary eye, casting it at its best as a time for drunks and vandals, and at its worst, a night of evil.

pictured: a Satan-worshiper in the making.

At the very least, many kids I grew up with were told it was anti-Christian.

But we kids all new better: this holiday had nothing to do with what you believed in, at least when you’re a child. It was about being scared for fun, about dressing up as anything you wanted to be, running from door to door and demanding free candy from strangers… and then getting it.
For the kids that couldn’t gather it themselves, it wasn’t unusual for a few of us who did to share our haul the next school day.


Halloween - the day, the season - has been warped from a solemn celebration of life and death to a time of fear and paranoia, perverted with consumerism, and demonized by scared parental concern groups.

Dreaming of Halloween

I had another one of my strange dreams last night. It was kind of funny to me in that it was seasonally appropriate.

I was walking alone at night, down a small paved road with trees on either side. There were bright lights strung up all around - orange, white and yellow. All the trees were beautiful shades of red and orange.

There was a cottage at the end of the path, decorated with fall wreaths, Indian corn, pumpkins, squash, etc. I knew that I was supposed to go in, so I did.

Inside, the house was decorated for Halloween, and there were bowls of candy out. I didn’t see them at first, but there were a bunch of other women in the house with me - some little girls, some teenage girls, some women (who I somehow knew were the mothers of the children) and a very old woman who seemed to be in charge of everyone. EVERYONE was wearing a costume - the little girls were dressed mostly as fairies and imps, and older girls were dressed mostly in fantasy costumes - goddesses, witches, queens, etc. Everyone was laughing and working on small crafts, or cooking.

But something strange was going on in the back of the main room.