My kids have a kind of warped idea of Halloween because for the last couple years I’ve managed to convince them that the way it works is that you go trick-or-treating, collect a bunch of candy and then come home and sit on your stoop and give away the candy to other kids who come by. Kind of an inverse Ponzi scheme. I know they’ll be in therapy for the next thirty years, but in the meantime they’ve actually loved giving out the candy. And at the moment, they’re both very excited about Halloween. Last week we carved jack o’lanterns out of pumpkins that had looked medium size (to me) at the farm where we bought them but turned out to be in fact (as my husband Jeff had claimed) absolutely enormous when we got them into our New York City apartment! We’ve started making the giraffe costume for my daughter Miriam and the dragon costume for my son Micah, to his detailed drawn specifications.
As we were discussing the costumes the other night, Miri asked, “What’s Halloween for? I mean, what does it celebrate?” I wondered with a pang of guilt whether I had sown confusion in her poor little mind – whether I had deprived her of the understanding, obvious to every other five-year-old, that Halloween is about getting and, more importantly, eating candy. But what to tell her? Was our version – this flow of candy in and back out to the world – beautifully cyclical or pointlessly circular?
And what does Halloween celebrate, anyway? Parents and people who work with kids know that when a kid asks, for example, where do babies come from, they’re not really asking for a detailed exposition on reproduction. So I was pretty sure Miri wasn’t looking for a lecture on the Celtic pagan origins of Halloween and the harvest and the overlap time between the living and the dead. That’s not what she wanted to know. She wanted to know why we here today, her and her brother and their friends get dressed up in costumes and go around door to door saying “trick or treat” and complete strangers give them candy. Which they then give away to other strangers. Why?
I didn’t have a good answer for her at the time, but I think I’m starting to come up with one. Halloween is a celebration of local community. In fact it’s the only celebration of local community. Other holidays commemorate something that happened far, far away. And usually the bigger the holiday, the further we’ll travel to be with family to celebrate it. But Halloween, you don’t travel. You don’t even get on a subway except maybe to go to a party. The central ritual of Halloween – the trick-or-treating – you do by walking out your front door and interacting with your neighbors. Or by staying home and receiving your neighbors with kindness. It’s probably the only time all year for most American families that they will dare to knock on their neighbor’s doors unannounced. And the only time when it’s okay to ask your neighbor for a gift. And the only time you’re expected to give a gift to your neighbors, whether you know them or like them or not. And the only time that you would ever trust strangers, people you know nothing about, to give your children something to eat and let your children eat it.
By normal, every day standards in this culture, that’s crazy! That’s not the kind of world we live in. We live in the world that Samira described, where your neighbors look through you and where the clerk at the grocery where you’ve shopped for ten years acts like she’s never seen you before. Where belligerent, lonely people yell at you for offering them a pizza. We live in the world of online communities, virtual social networks, email and cellphones and texting in which where you are physically – or where you happen to live – doesn’t matter at all.
In this context, Halloween is really an extraordinary thing. It’s a throwback to another era when we did know our neighbors, when we would knock on their doors many times a year and they would knock on ours. When our kids ate in their kitchens and played in their backyards and their kids ate in our kitchens and played in our backyards. When we didn’t go trick-or-treating among strangers but among neighbors we knew well and whose lives were intertwined with ours. The world isn’t like that any more. But on Halloween, we all agree to pretend that it is. It’s a kind of giddy denial of reality. We all make an unspoken agreement that for this one evening we all get a reprieve from the fragmented, neighborless world that we normally complain about. And for the most part, the occasional razor blade in an apple notwithstanding, it works. It’s pretty amazing, given the statistical odds, how infrequently anything bad happens. We all make this decision together by virtue of this holiday, and – poof! – instant, safe local community.
Then there’s the small matter of the exchange of candy. Despite what five-year-olds may say, I don’t think the candy is actually the end goal of Halloween. The candy is just a currency backed by the gold of face-to-face human connection. Its sweetness is the sweetness of the nurturing love of the whole village. The exchange of this currency – household to household, adult to child, child to child – is a kind of secular communion. We give, we receive, we trust, we participate. If you could train an infrared camera on a neighborhood on Halloween you would see the network of connections, crisscrossing as the children made their way from building to building. It’s that network, it’s those connections, it’s that communion between people that we celebrate on Halloween.
So we can think of Halloween as a quaint and nostalgic yearning for a bygone era. Or we can think of it as a way that our culture is struggling to maintain a toehold in a vision of a better world. The feeling of community in the streets on Halloween is so rare and so special – maybe only matched in the wake of a disaster like September 11 or Hurricane Sandy. But we don’t have to wait for the next calamity or the next hurricane or blackout or snowstorm. We don’t even have to wait for Halloween. We can start right now – today – getting to know our neighbors, helping them out, inviting their kids over, looking for opportunities to connect. Maybe we can all be a little less guarded and a little more generous. We can be online a little less and here and now a little more.
So, before you all go off today feeling sorry for my kids because they collect candy that they don’t get to eat, let me assure you that they do in fact get to eat a portion of the profits. Like mini-Wall St. candy brokers, they keep some of the associated fees from the transaction. But they also give a lot back out into the system. And I’m hoping that this can be a trend that goes well beyond Halloween. Because it simply feels great when the good stuff of life – candy, love, goodwill, and feelings of belonging – flow, not just to us, but through us. It feels great when we can be part of a cycle of goodness. It feels great when we can welcome everyone in our little corner of the world to the table. It’s a real trick and a real treat when we can be conduits for a communion of sweetness between neighbors.