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Halloween - Because carving patterns into squash, lighting them on fire and leaving them on your front door step makes perfect sense.
A recent study has shown that the United States of America is only second in the world when it comes to official recognition of meaningless holidays such as Halloween. The country which actually leads the world in meaningless holidays is a tiny tropical island in the South Pacific.
“Hey, Zoonunga, another three day weekend. I love National Hamster Recognition Day.”
“Yes, Matundish, but I especially enjoy Inny Belly Button Hero Week.”
“I always forget… Is that before or after the Festival of the Killer Bees?”
Of course these survey results would be even more meaningful if I hadn’t just made them up. But the fact remains that here in the United States we have an obsession with celebrating nothing, and Halloween is no exception.
Halloween dates all the way back to 1964 when the Hershey Chocolate Company pulled a masterful advertising campaign which claimed: “Our chocolate is so good, it brings the dead back to life.”
The height of the campaign featured Milton S. Hershey himself, which was appropriate seeing how Milton had actually died in 1945. These were before the days of computer animation so the company actually dug up Milton’s corpse and made it do a little jig on the Ed Sullivan Show in Weekend at Bernie’s fashion until its legs fell off and they had to cut back to some second-rate band from Liverpool.
Though the ad campaign was in bad taste (the slogan, not the candy), the idea of ghosts, goblins, and glucose caught on and became another part of our rich (and totally senseless) American culture.
I came from a family where holidays were given a strange sort of importance akin to the Pope stopping by for Sunday dinner or the moon crashing into the earth. We celebrated Thanksgiving by dressing up like our favorite Pilgrim or Indian, we actually went to work on Labor Day, and members of my family have been known to get teary-eyed on Ground Hog’s Day. Halloween, of course, was no different
A week or so before Halloween my family would drive out to the local farmer’s market to look for the “perfect pumpkin.” We would never find the pumpkin, of course, because by October 20th the farmer’s market has all its Christmas decorations on display and has a small room of Valentine’s decorations ready to go. At this point we would head over to the nearby grocery store and root through their dumpster until we found a pumpkin that is generally in one piece and only has a few pathes of mold. On years when we couldn’t find a pumpkin my father would arrive home a day later with an out of season watermelon that had been spray-painted orange. We kids pretended not to notice.
When the big night arrived we would place the pumpkin in the center of the dining room table and plan our attack. We strategized where we can cut in the eyes, nose and mouth and what sort of expression our vegetable icon would have after we had taken a multitude of blades and utensils to it.
And while other families may argue and fight over what they want, our family always worked like a well-oiled machine on Halloween. It seems that my family bonds best with sharp knives and an outlet for violence.
The actual Jack–O–Lantern process resembled a crew of blind monkeys trying to perform a lobotomy. While our father scalped the orange gourd and began pulling out its cerebellum while, we stood back and said things like “Oooo” and “Gross, Dad.” This was our official function.
When most of the gunk (scientific term) had been yanked from the head, our father would hand us a spoon and tells us to scoop away. We would then scrape and dig in the pumpkin with the fervor that can only be found in holiday hyped children. The surgery complete, we gathered around the hollow head and sketched a face on the vegetable. Again my father would pull out a large sharp knife and instead of brain surgery he’d perform plastic surgery. Twenty minutes of carving produced amazing results.
“That’s a pretty ugly face, Dad.”
“Yep. Looks like your mother when she gets up in the morning.”
It is comments like this which always earned my father the privilege of taking the screaming kids Trick-or-Treating later in the evening. Before terrorizing the neighborhood we placed a candle in the pumpkin and dropped the flaming monstrosity on our front porch so that it may be smashed by roving hoodlums during the night.
Trick-or-Treating was a very straightforward affair in my neighborhood in the early 1980s. All the girls would dress up as Strawberry Shortcake or Teenage Hookers and all the boys would dress up as Luke Skywalker or Superman, depending on hair color.
We’d gather at a predetermined spot and plan our path of pillaging and progress from porch to porch. Between houses we’d take nibbles from our candy caches and by the end of the night have empty bags and enough sugar coursing through a veins that each of us had the energy 20 kids and moved around like a midget speed freaks.
Of course, with energy came tension.
“Only sissies wear tights!” a Luke Skywalker would scream.
“Oh yeah? Well at least my father isn’t a bad guy!” argued back a Superman.
“He’s not my father!”
“Is too!”
“Is not!”
“Is too!”
It wouldn’t take too long for the Luke Skywalkers to attack the Supermen with long sticks which doubled as lightsabers during galactic times of trouble. The Supermen would return the favor by taking off their capes and using them as bright red whips. The movies would have been much more interesting if they were written by a bunch of candy wired kids.
Eventually the high would wear off and we’d crash to the ground as did our blood sugar. There we’d rest - bruised and bloody, sick to our stomachs and with barely enough strength to lift our little costumed bodies off the cold, wet ground. Sometimes our conversations would turn to girls (the Hookers were always more popular), but mostly we just argued over whether or not a lightsaber could really hurt the Man of Steel.
Finally my father and the other parents would find us and haul back home for a treatment of sugar detox. And just as I was about to drift into a sleep filled with sugar-induced nightmares I’d think back on the night and immediately begin plotting what I want to dress up as next time…
You know, for Thanksgiving.
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