When I go for a walk in my hometown of Wasa Lake, I can still remember every house that gave out full-sized chocolate bars each Halloween. I never knew the people living in those houses, not then or since. But decades after the sugar-rush has subsided, the sweetness of their simple gesture lingers still. When they put those big bars in my bag, they also gave me something else: a vague, innocent impression that good people live here.

Halloween has always been my favourite holiday. The costumes, haunted houses, and trick-or-treating were exponentially more exciting than the Christmas tree, opening presents, or singing carols. Yes, Halloween didn’t come with time off from school, but it couldn’t have: unlike the other holidays, Halloween had to be experienced with friends, outside of the home. In contrast, Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas felt so emotionally-laden and overly sentimental. They entailed being indoors, seated at the table with family, the fancy cutlery, turkey. Halloween meant running around the streets, with friends, in costumes, collecting candy, screaming. Where Christmas was inside, passive, Halloween was out there, vigorous. But it’s even more than that.

Halloween has the honourable hold of being our only holiday that is directed at strangers, namely children, as well as being performed outside of the home. Halloween has no single location, where people congregate and sit; Halloween demands that we interact with our own neighbourhoods in a dynamic way. Once outside, in the streets, particular children are not singled out for special preference to receive the most expensive gifts, but rather everyone is handed the same things, which also happens to be (most) children’s favourite thing, candy. When it comes to trick-or-treat, the treats are itself the trick, by which we transform our neighbourhoods into little havens of charity, where any fear is all part of the fun, and where strange doors are opened at a word to reveal kind, generous people waiting behind. Dressing up in costumes and handing out candy to stranger’s children is a yearly game we play, and it’s a powerful way to teach an important lesson—social trust.

The main Western Holidays are arguably Christmas/New Year’s Eve; Mother/Father’s Day; Valentine’s Day; Thanksgiving/Easter; and to which we can add Halloween. If we reveal our values with our wallets, then in terms of spending, this also happens to be the order in which we rank their importance. Amongst these ‘big-five,’ Halloween stands out as the black-sheep. All these other holidays ask us to single out and focus on those most important to us, those whose lives we most value, whose bonds have made us who we are. And so perhaps Halloween should be seen as the least important, relatively speaking. Because what is most essential is not that we carve pumpkins, but that we make sure to carve out the time to turn inwards with these special loved ones. And so for most holidays, we withdraw into the hearth, we consolidate around our family-kin networks, we feed ourselves and gorge our own bellies, we lavish luxurious gifts and praise amongst ourselves, and we enjoy (or not!) the company of own respective families.    

It is Christmas, of course, that most encapsulates this social practice. Each Christmas we retreat into solipsistic sects of sentimentality within the privacy of our own homes. Because Christmas seems to presuppose the family-clan as its basic organizational unit, perhaps it’s because I am a child of divorce that Christmas has always felt like some sort of sham. With its admonishments to be happy and full of cheer, its claims to be “the most wonderful time of the year,” (and the sheer weight of the advertising and marketing machines behind it all), it doth protest too much, methinks. And once the Christmas lights come down and the darkness of winter envelops us, depression rates rise, and suicides spike. All the unrestrained spending and supposed cheer has left us empty, it seems. Many of our families cannot withstand this prolonged internal congregation, tears appear in its fabric, and some members fall through the holes. Now, if I’m beginning to sound all too much like the green Grinch, then let me start to shape-shift into a goblin or ghoul, and turn to look upon Halloween.     

The rituals of Halloween turn us outward. If Christmas or Easter was left broken along with my family, Halloween remained intact because it depended on what was outside the family. Or even in the case of my wife’s intact family, the father of which is a pilot, whereas they would often celebrate Christmas, Easter, or Thanksgiving a couple days early or late as his schedule required, he would always have to call in sick if he was meant to fly on Halloween. Because Halloween  doesn’t just get us out of living-rooms and into our neighbourhoods, but in so doing it links us together with both friends and especially strangers.  

Not only does Halloween foreground strangers, but it focuses on children. The Christmas tree gathers everyone around, as does the dinner table for Thanksgiving, but the defining moment of Halloween is trick-or-treating, and tricks are for kids. The children adorn costumes, cover their faces in paint, and although there are the occasional princesses and (increasingly) superheroes, the emphasis is on something scary—witches, werewolves, vampires, and other such monsters. It is a night to embrace not ‘the family,’ but ‘the frightening’. That said, it is of course a kind of faux fear, and behind the fake fangs and red food-colour blood are smiles. And then the children join together with their friends, and racing around their neighbourhoods clutching pillowcases, they announce themselves at the homes of (more often than not) strangers, who open their doors and give them candy. Candy! That highest good—the summum bonum—of a child’s desires. The love of which the true monsters of the world—kidnappers—supposedly utilize to lure children into their clutches. Indeed, part of what makes kidnapping so grotesque is how it takes advantage of something so beautiful: a child’s implicit trust in others, even strangers. The revulsion of kidnapping reveals, however, the reassuring truth that we naturally trust others, and that it is mistrust that must be taught and learned. Halloween is a night where we take a moment to, in some small way, replenish that trust in our children and each other.

When I became an adult myself, I was excited to play my part in this game, and to now become that house that would be known for full-size chocolate bars—a good person’s house. I was living in Ottawa at the time, and, handing out those bars that year, the squeals of delight with which they were received, transported me back to my own cherished childhood experiences in Wasa. This made it all the more shocking when suddenly one of the adult chaperones stuck his own hand into the candy bowl to take a bar for himself. “Full-sized bars, awesome!,” exclaimed this jack-ass, grinning. I was too taken aback to say anything at the time, as I essentially watched this oaf of man take candy from children. Later, reflecting back on his behaviour, I found it in my heart to forgive him: perhaps I had tapped into his own dormant reservoir of childhood excitement. How could I blame him for that?

Surely the unconscious desire to recapture some element of lost childhood elation is part of the explanation for why Halloween continues to exercises such an enchantment amongst teenagers and young adults as well. As if by some drunken, drug-induced euphoria we could re-enter that innocent Eden from which we have been cast.  Of course, such re-entrance is by its very nature impossible, but its futility only redoubles our efforts. Halloween taps into the all-too-adult desire to be a child again, if only for a moment. In the party hot-spot that is Los Angeles’s West Hollywood, Halloween celebrations are a week-long affair, rivalled only by Pride festivities. After all, Californians—with their youthful optimism, blissful happiness, confident self-absorption, and deep desire to be marvelled at—are the true children of America, and therefore of the world. (I say this from a place of love for both California and her children.)

Parents, however, go in the opposite direction, and no other holiday causes them as much fear or anxiety as does Halloween. And why not: Halloween, unlike our other holidays, is out there, in the world. And no parent can bring themselves to fully trust the world when they appraise it through the lens of their child’s safety. For this reason, against all evidence to the contrary, parents will latch on to rumours of razorblades in chocolate bars and needles in candy bowls; so certain do they feel that on this spooky night, behind the capes and horns, really does lie some sinister presence, ready to devour their child before they can usher them back to the safety of home and hearth. Alas, parent’s Halloween fears are actually correct but misplaced, as it turns out that Halloween is indeed an especially fatally dangerous night for children. But as is so often the case with even our greatest fears, the cause of the danger is ourselves: in this case not poison candies, but cars. While so busy conjuring imaginary psychopaths, scores of parents themselves reverse over children who have stepped off a sidewalk, and pedestrian deaths on Halloween spike to the highest number of any other date. The carnage caused by cars is the only ‘invisible’ spectre out and about that night, and it is these poor children who become the genuine ghosts of Halloween, their unhappy homes now true haunted houses.  

A common cliché of growing older is to romanticize one’s past, while lamenting the strange future with which one is continually confronted. At the ripe age of thirty-three, I can already feel myself doing this when I see how trick-or-treating seems to be withering away more and more each Halloween. In Calgary, children now go to the Malls to trick-or-treat instead of their own streets, and in these havens of commercialism the children receive from the employees of Footlocker and GameStop what they once got from their neighbours. Or in my own hometown of Wasa Lake, as its population has continued to decline and more properties become summer cabins for Albertans, trick-or-treat has been replaced by something called trunk-or-treat, where parents park their cars at the Community Hall, and rather than walking from home to home, the kids simply circle the parking lot and scoop their candy from the trunks. These underlying demographic and economic forces have hollowed out our town, and All Hallow’s Eve has lost the kind of community upon which it depended.

Without claiming to draw some kind of straight line between the loss of trick-or-treating and decreasing levels of social trust, I can’t help but feel that something important has been lost. I make no exaggeration when I claim that trick-or-treating transformed the way I conceived of my neighbourhood in my childhood mind. When I look back on the practice now, I find myself believing that Halloween likely has untold social benefits; I see our social fabric knit together by the unwrapping of candy wrappers; and through these scampering skeletons I see the underlying body politic exercising and flexing its muscles.  Muscles that I fear now atrophy, in a world where a stranger appearing on your stoop can be perceived as threatening, and where you take your life into your hands when you raise your fist to knock upon a stranger’s door. In Wasa Lake, trick-or-treating is now dead and gone. But when I walk through the streets at night, I still see those houses that used to pass out full-sized chocolate bars. With the warm light shining through their windows, they almost look like giant jack-o’-lanterns.

Kieran Mabey