New Year’s Eve is, of course, the most disappointing holiday on the jolly holiday calendar of the year — that color wheel that turns in revolving colors as the wheel of time turns — but Halloween, at least for me, may be a close second.
There was a good one in October 2020, at the height of Covid, before we had a vaccine, when I invited a group of kids and moms over to our house for a “distanced” outdoor mini-party. As the autumn leaves fell silently around us, the adults stood, hot cider toddies in hand, in a broad circle around a bonfire I’d lighted inside a galvanized steel tub — the tub scorched a black circle into my front brick walkway — while the kids ran shrieking to Herrick Park to spray shaving cream at one another, and then we all walked together to Hook Pond under the clear light of the moon. But other than that good year, Halloween has been a letdown since . . . well, at least since the mid-1980s.
I’m childishly optimistic that this year, always this year, will be the year that trick-or-treaters will return to our front door. I go into a storage trunk and pull out the papier-mâché pumpkin with a green stem lid, dating back to the 1930s or 1940s, that has held Hershey bars for three generations of Rattrays at this point; I fill it with chocolate and Almond Joy, but they never do come. (It’s actually not a papier-mâché pumpkin, as I noticed very belatedly while setting up for that high-Covid All Hallows’ Eve, but an orange! It’s about 14” inches in circumference, and dimpled like an orange, and makes the perfect vessel for October treats, but I believe someone must have bought it as a souvenir of the Florida orange groves around the Second World War.)
When we lived over on Accabonac Road and Nettie and Teddy were 8 and 5, my knickers were in such a twist about the decline of Halloween that I actually went around the neighborhood offering fellow residents of Lily Hill a color-Xeroxed flier inviting children to trick-or-treat on our street. I felt that if we agitated for it, kids might stop at our front door rather than just going to make the (to me depressingly commercial and lacking in thrills) rounds of the shops on Main and Newtown. Maybe three kids did. Boo.
If you read old issues of The East Hampton Star, you get the flavor of disobedience, devilry, and light mayhem that the holiday once brought to the town: Boys and girls ran around rattling shutters and clanging garden gates; they broke into the East Hampton High School building in 1912 (no damage done); in 1926, someone hijacked tools from a wagon belonging to H.C. Filer and threw them about on the grass by Town Pond; in 1928, rude things were written with wax on the sides of a brand-new chauffeured car; in the early 1930s, the youth made an annual habit of scrawling “pornographic obscenities” on the windows of the Montauk Arms apartment building, et cetera.
The Star and the “Hallowe’en Committee” (!) of the Ladies Village Improvement Society sponsored an essay contest in 1946. The title of the winning essay, by a 12th-grader named Craig Bell, was “It Must Be Stopped.”
“The very first idea a child gets of Hallowe’en is one of tearing down fences and breaking windows,” wrote young Craig (who must have been popular with his classmates). “But children, when they think of Hallowe’en, must not think of it in that way, but should imagine witches and fairies celebrating a cornfield underneath a round, bright moon.”
“But children do not learn this,” continued the upright author. “They listen to their fathers tell of when they painted some poor farmer’s cow red and it died; they listen to older boys tell of the cops chasing them, and they grow to believe that to have the cops after them on Halloween night is a great thing. This is really a form of juvenile delinquency and it must be stopped.”
Before you start firing off letters to the editor complaining that I’m pro-broken windows and obscene slogans in wax on the side of expensive automobiles, of course I’m not. But I’m anti the sad daylight parade from store to store that Halloween has become and I’m not even thrilled that parents are so present on the night in the vicinity of Cooper Lane. Can we not let the little monsters have even one night of freedom and mischief?
Don’t get me started on the new norm of the whole sexy-costumes-for-grown-ups thing. It’s gone way beyond the sexy Witch. Now we have sexy Pokemon costumes for 16-year-olds, sexy ears of corn, sexy Grinches Who Stole Christmas, sexy Scooby-Doos, sexy mice, pizza slices, and sexy Mr. Potato Heads.
I mean . . . we knew feminism was going in a weird direction back in the early oughts when we women were encouraged to do workout classes on stripper poles, but if this sexy Halloween costume thing isn’t a symptom of American culture gone . . . gone awry, I don’t . . . I don’t know. You have to see the absurdity in it. It’s quite humorous, really.
My daughter and I were on a FaceTime call on Monday night when she started talking about her need to find yellow rubber rain boots for her Paddington costume. How adorable is that? She’s going to wear a misshaped red felt hat, like Paddington, and the galoshes, and a blue duffel coat. She’s going to be the cutest bear from Darkest Peru.
“I love it!” I said. “Aww! At least you’re not going as sexy FedEx delivery girl again!”
“But it is sexy,” she said. “It’s sexy Paddington.”
We started to laugh. Ha, ha, ha!
“It cannot be sexy Paddington!” I said, really laughing hard by now. “It’s a bear! A stuffed bear! It’s Paddington!”
“But it is,” she said, cracking up, too. “I’m wearing tiny blue hot pants!”