The Halloween Files (Part IV): The Shiny-Red Candy Apple of Community

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In case my last reflection on Halloween and the "Fear of the Numinous" was a bit too exotic for your palate, let me try some food for thought that's a bit more down to earth. 

Bran-for-thought.  

Or maybe a candy apple for thought, as the case may be.  Because all mysteria tremendi aside, the other thing Halloween is about is good, old fashioned community.  All the elements of a strong community are there:  parents taking playful walks with their kids, neighbours coming to call, opening your door to strangers, the people on the block coming out in the open and doing something together for a change.  Halloween's got it all. 

And when you stop to think about it, of all the red-letter days of the year, it's the only one that emphasizes the broader community like this.  Valentine's Day is about couples; Christmas is about the family (and increasingly, the nuclear family); Thanksgiving is about the extended family; Easter may or may not have the church thrown in.  But only Halloween focuses on the community generally like this (November 11th may be the exception that proves the rule, but then Remembrance Day is more a civic than a communal thing).

Rubber devil masks notwithstanding, Halloween is about neighbours playing together as a community.

Or it once was. 

Last week I saw my first ever "Get your Halloween shopping done early" ad.  Everything you need to enjoy Halloween, it assured us, is available at Walmart.  The latest Iron Man costume with real working lights, quality candy the kids will love that won't break your budget, kitchy plastic lawn-ghouls: Walmart's got it all.

Watching the ad, it struck me that nothing can be marketed without first wringing out its soul.

Not to wax nostalgic, but in my day, you made your own costume, or your parents did, and in making it you did something creative together; then you wandered the streets with other kids in hand-made costumes while parents visited on the curb; and there were still some homes that handed out real, home-made candy apples or popcorn balls (they were never as coveted as a chocolate bar, mind you, but those were so rare back then they tasted twice as good when you got one). 

In WalMart's world, everything that once oriented Halloween towards the community--creativity and home-made goodness and imagination and hand-craft-i-ness and play-- all the things that can't be marketed and are beyond value--have been replaced.  Instead, we have pressure to buy stuff; and beneath that, a deeper pressure to believe that personal identity is best expressed through a pointless purchase, and that expressing yourself in this way matters more than community, anyway.

A couple of years ago I read a fascinating book by Murray Jardine called The Making and Unmaking of Technological Society. Jardine traces the history of Western liberal capitalist democracy, and concludes that our current obsession with aesthetic self-expression through consumerism represents the great moral and existential crisis of our time. 

If he's right (and I think he is) then it seems to me that hordes of bedsheet-shrouded phantoms wandering the streets at night aren't the scariest thing about Halloween.  Scarier still are the polyester Spiderman (TM) costumes (Made in China) that have replaced them.