As I remember it, Halloween was a time when my friends and I, or perhaps my brothers and I (depending on my popularity that year) would go door-to-door asking for candy from anyone that used electricity after dark. That was the sign. If a light was on, you knocked. We became so greedy at points, we'd approach houses with just a TV on, a crystal clear sign the inhabitants wanted nothing to do with this damned holiday. In these instances we figured the worst that could happen is they wouldn't answer, but the best, oh the best was that they would answer and then they'd give us the candy.
Any reader of this blog knows I often, at not yet thirty, suffer from crippling bouts of nostalgia. However, nothing compares to my ranting on the deplorable state of trick-or-treating in this country. By country, I mean my hometown, which I'm always confident serves as a perfectly good microcosm to the entire country. My hometown, Washburn, Wisconsin is aging. In fact, it's old. There are two booming businesses in the town of 2,800 people. One is a bakery, the other is a nursing home. Nonetheless, there are still a few children in town, and they are suffering. Suffering from a town full of two types of people. Geriatrics, who can't remember how much fun they had shelling out candy to ungrateful children, and strangers.
The decline didn't happen all at once though. Like the elderly, things started falling apart little by little. Trick-or-treating in Washburn took its first hit back in the late nineties, with the now infamous (I mean now, as in just after I post this) daylight-start decision. Citing safety concerns, trick-or-treating was moved from the apt start time of 6 o'clock in the evening, when at the end of October in northern Wisconsin it was dark and spooky, to 4 o'clock in the afternoon. The two hour difference couldn't be greater. Have you ever walked through a cemetery in the daytime? It's nice, you notice the well kept lawns, you read the sweet epitaphs, it's a quiet place where people come to visit with, remember, or pray for their lost loved ones. At night, it's a place packed with homicidal ghosts. The darkness makes all the difference. And even if you didn't want to scare the pants off of children, there's something inherently wrong with those perfectly fun styrofoam headstones lining front lawns in broad daylight. There's nothing to "Beware" of in the daylight.
It's not just the house decorations that lose something in sunlight. The children seem to look different dressed up in the day. You can almost see it in their faces as they walk down the sidewalk. It's like everyone was caught in their jammies. They start second guessing their decision to dress like a vampire, Shouldn't I be sparkling right now? Suddenly, little Robbie Jenson, who just last night looked so confident when trying on his Superman suit no longer looks anything like Superman. Instead, he looks an awful lot like the kid who wet himself in class last week.
The daytime trick-or-treating was just the beginning of a whole set of damaging changes. Childhood obesity has had a real negative impact on the image of adults helping children fill buckets with candy. Even without the Type-II diabetes, Halloween may have been destined to fail as people have evolved from neighbors to the people that live next door.
It's not like I lived one hundred years ago, but even in my short lifetime, there was a significant change in how people of a block communicated. When I was younger, my brothers and I lived across the street from a nurse, who was called to consult my mom on whether or not our injuries were severe enough to drive to the hospital in the next town. My family had zero contact with this person outside of those consultations, but my mom knew her just as she knew everyone from working at the local gas station. They weren't friends, they were neighbors.
I know I am sounding ridiculously hokey, and also, know that this neighborly sentiment is still very much alive in some communities, but as I said in the beginning of this post, Washburn is Anytown, USA and as far as I'm concerned, we are indeed losing a sense of community. You can see it in how Halloween is celebrated in many towns now. It wasn't as if our town suddenly became too dangerous to let kids go trick-or-treating at night. We just didn't trust each other with our children in the dark. If I had to guess, it's because we stopped getting to know one another. My family was no different. When new people moved in across the street, as our neighbors moved away or into nursing homes, we knew nothing of them. We cordially waved to one another if we accidentally made eye-contact, but we didn't know what they did, or where they were from, or if they had a history of kidnapping. If they didn't work in the grocery store or gas station, where you were forced to have contact, we simply didn't know. And apparently, if you don't know, it's safest to assume the worst. Somehow we let our town become a cemetery, perfectly quaint in the day, but at night, a ghost town.
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